Fintech & payments
KYC-adjacent screening at signup, before an account exists to launder anything through.
What the problem actually is
Financial products attract synthetic identities, mule-account recruitment and jurisdiction-shopping. The regulatory burden falls at onboarding, so the cheapest place to catch a bad actor is the same place. Anonymising infrastructure matters more here than almost anywhere else: an applicant deliberately hiding their country during a KYC flow has told you something.
Signals that carry the weight here
Legitimate privacy tools, but an applicant obscuring their location while opening a financial account is a genuine risk indicator in a way it is not for a content site.
Sanctions and licensing are territorial. A declared country that disagrees with the network location is a compliance question, not just a fraud one.
VoIP numbers are trivially disposable, which is a poor fit for an account you must be able to contact for years.
Where to start
strictness=3 (paranoid) — Paranoid. In this sector a false positive costs a manual review; a false negative can cost a licence. That asymmetry justifies a threshold nobody else should use.
A defensible starting point, not a guarantee. Strictness moves the verdict thresholds only; the risk score itself never changes, so you can re-tune without re-scoring anything.
The call
curl -X POST "https://www.layercall.com/v1/score/user" \
-H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"ip":"$IP","email":"$EMAIL","phone":"$PHONE","strictness":3}'1,000 lookups a month free, no card. Get an API key.
Questions
Is this a KYC or AML product?
No. It screens signals around an identity — network, email, phone, domain, device — and returns a risk score. It does not verify a government ID, check sanctions lists, or produce a regulatory audit trail. Treat it as a pre-filter that reduces how many applicants reach your real KYC vendor, not as a substitute for one.