Founder's Story - AI Scams Are Ruining Lives – Now We’re Fighting Back | Ep. 200 with Ricardo Amper CEO of Incode

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

In this urgent and eye-opening episode of Founder's Story, Daniel sits down with Ricardo Amper, the CEO and Founder of Incode, the revolutionary identity verification platform trusted by Amazon, Citibank, and even U.S. elections.Ricardo reveals how deepfakes, AI fraud, and impersonation scams are rapidly increasing—and why the future of the internet depends on solving trust. From building a pre-Facebook social app to securing elections with facial biometrics, his journey is filled with unexpected pivots, high-stakes innovation, and global impact.If you've ever wondered how we’ll know who’s real in the AI era, this episode answers it.Topics Covered:Ricardo’s failed first startup and why timing matters more than you thinkThe near fraud that almost cost Incode a major dealWhy AI is breaking the internet—and how Incode is fixing itHow governments and Fortune 500s are using IncodeThe future of digital identity, trust, and agentic AIWhat Ricardo believes is the next frontier after facial recognitionHow identity fraud is impacting everyone from small businesses to democracy itselfGuest Info:Ricardo Amper Founder & CEO, Incode 🌐 https://incode.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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A message from the D.C. Highway Safety Office and the Metropolitan Police Department. Hey, everyone, welcome back to Founders Story. Today we have Ricardo Amper, the CEO and founder and Police Department. Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have Ricardo Amper, the CEO and founder of Encode. And this is gonna be a very interesting topic today because it's something that we've been discussing in other episodes, but we never found a company who's really solving this issue.

So that's why I am stoked to have you Ricardo, but you are reinventing identity verification power trust worldwide which is what we need. So before we dive in all those things because it's this is gonna be so critical I'd like to understand how did you even get started in this field in this industry and why are you solving this problem? Well thank you Daniel thank you for inviting me here. It's a long story.

I learned entrepreneurship from my dad, and then when I was in college back in 99, so it's a long time ago, I wanted internet to be more fun. That was like pre-Facebook. And I started a company called The Bubble, and it was the same concept as Facebook years before that. But I learned a hard lesson, which is that timing is very important because I started

late 99, incorporated April 2000 when was the dot com crashed, raised a little bit of money and then I couldn't raise more money. And so my first experience was actually the failure that taught me to always be humble and how there's a matter of timing and chance in everything that you do. So you need to be able to be incredibly resilient. Then after that, I started a beverage company that I sold to a CPG company, the biggest bread company in the world.

And then a turnaround of a personal story where my dad passed away. I had to quit business school, go and do a turnaround of his company that I eventually sold to a big public chemical multinational. And then years after I was able to pursue my passion, which was in technology, and we started in code, but we started with a very different thing. We were, back in 2015, we were sharing photos with facial recognition. So we had an app that you would take pictures

with your friends and they would automatically be shared, or photos that you never shared were shared based on facial recognition, which I think was a terrible idea. But the one thing that was a very good idea was that we built an amazing team of engineers. We were solving things in a way that nobody was doing that, meaning doing AI on the phone before it was a thing. And then we got a little bit lucky. Apple kind of made facial recognition okay. Then we pivoted into doing something more interesting, which is how do you verify someone's identity

by scanning their document and doing biometrics? And eventually it became a big deal when COVID came and banks, governments, doctors needed to verify people digitally. You needed to find a way that was secure and our whole industry took off. And so we were at the right moment at the right time. So let's go back to these exits. As a founder, as someone who, you know, stepped in and became the C-suite, what do you think it takes for a company to get to the viability of when another company would want to acquire it?

to the viability of when another company would want to acquire it? Well, I think it has to be it has to do with the original problem you're solving. It has to be a problem that's interesting enough and a solution that's significantly better. And and honestly, I think founders have an inherent advantage and potentially a disadvantage, which is the lack of knowledge. So when you go to an industry and you understand and you see something that should exist, but doesn't exist, it's much easier to see it if you don't have that context. And I think in my life, both, you know, when I did the social network, the beverage company

or Encode, it was exactly the same. For example, ENCODE people thought that it was impossible for AI to be better at understanding whether a document is doctored, whether you're you, whether you're actually live streaming and it's not a deep fake. Because everybody thought that having a human reviewing is better. And to me, it didn't make sense. And we just went and used our skills that we're doing, you know, the photo sharing app, and we ended up solving it. With the beverage company, I thought powdered beverages back in Latin America

were not very good. And all of a sudden, you drank something that you couldn't even figure out that was a powdered beverage. And so I think that's a benefit of having zero context. I'm curious about the timing. So we've heard this from billionaires, from super successful people like yourself, that timing could be the most important thing to the success of their organization. So I'm curious when the timing of ENCODE, I know you had a certain problem you're solving, and now it's

transformed in into what it is today. Did the explosion of chat GBT and all you know, image creation apps and obviously deep fake of where it's at right now. Did all these things the last few years, really exponentially create momentum for encode? Absolutely, I think as I learned, I was, as it was impossible to succeed back when the thought come bursted, right? Even if we had a good idea, you know,

timing is a defining feature, but you don't control it. It's luck or blessing. And what you control is two things. First thing is you need to be solving a problem that's important and that hasn't been solved. And the second thing is you have to have an amazing team. And so those two things I think you control. And if you're persevering now, maybe you're lucky to be in those things. And so we had, I think, three things that change your company, Apple doing facial

recognition, everybody feeling comfortable with that. Number two, COVID and digitalizing and the three is the gen AI revolution that is making our industry much more important. And and we don't control it, but at least what you control is the two things that I mentioned. I've heard a scenario where a C-suite got a phone call and then transferred a large sum of money to what they thought was another C-suite, but it turns out it was deep fake. And that's just obviously one of, I'm sure, many sad That's just obviously one of I'm sure many sad opportunities that are coming up because of AI and people take advantage of that.

So how important is it what you're doing at Encode? I mean, that's a real story. And the interesting thing is it happened a year and a half ago to us where our treasurer was almost tricked to sending money to fund the escrow account for an M&A. And it was very credible. And then we started seeing a lot of our customers being attacked with deepfakes. You saw in the news how MGM and CSRS were shut down

for two weeks because someone successfully, through a deepfake, pretended to be a system admin and they took control of the whole Vegas for three weeks. And so certainly it's a big problem. And yesterday in CNBC, there was news about how many interviews, I think they quoted 40, about 40% of interviews are fraudulent now that you're interviewing someone who is not who you think they are. It's maybe even Chad GPT in the back. And so you can imagine this is a problem that is worth tackling. Let's talk more. I know ENCODE just, um, you know,

it was called a top company in your field, top visionary, um, which is incredible award that you were, you were just given, you know, very few companies received this recognition. So talk to me about what what it's like for you as the founder and then your amazing team as you get this recognition Because you're solving such a huge problem and you're one of the few I mean, it's wonderful It's great to get that recognition, but I think the the best recognition we get is is the trust of our customers I mean some of customers are like Citibank, Chime, Amazon. We're one of the few customers who's been used in the national election in the U.S. And we have many other thousands of customers like that. And what we feel is a huge sense of

responsibility because if we do our job well, which is verifying users identity, we help lower fraud. But most importantly, we help them grow. We help them acquire customers that are that are real and and they're going to do good for their business. And the second thing is, I think there's a more of a societal effect. If you think about everything that you do, whether you go out into a bus, open a bank

account, going to a doctor, there's an act of identity underlying. And so those acts are trustworthy. The rest is trustworthy. There's an incredible example in India. 15 years ago, it was one of the lowest-trusting societies in the world. Only 8% of Indians trusted each other to transact. And then they did something great, which is they said, we'll never go into paper IDs, we'll just do a digital biometric system. And in 15 years, it's now the highest-trusting society

in the world, more than Switzerland and Sweden, certainly more than the US. And it's changing people's lives because now interest rates go down. You trust voting more, which is something that should happen around the world. You can go to stadiums and feel safer. So it is a big deal. And so we think both the responsibility to our customers,

but also the responsibility to to our mission, which is what we think is the most important. I mean, trust without trust, the world will fall apart, right? Like you said, it's a global place. We do business with people not only from our neighboring cities, but all the way around the world. And if we can't trust who those people are, we can't operate. I mean, this is to me, I might be sometimes pessimistic with AI, although I am, you know, I love AI and I use it all the time. Um, but I am sometimes fearful if we don't solve these problems in the future. So how do you see, you know, how do you see the future of this going in the next few years?

Yeah, it's just going to make everything exponential, the good and the bad. And so the question is, you're saying is, is, is what percentage of interactions are trustful, right? And so as much as it's gonna make, it's gonna allow everybody to increase their productivity, grow their businesses, all of that, which is great. It's also gonna make Frusters more prevalent. You're gonna have a gentic AI doing things on your behalf, but it's also gonna have, and it's going to exponentially

multiply what frusters do. And the problem is how you're going to authenticate those agents. How are you going to make sure that that's an agent that Daniel commissioned? I would say first is it an agent or is it Daniel himself? Then if you commission that. And the question is, at the very beginning of saying, yes, I'm Daniel to that agent, the question is who determined your identity? Who was the, what type of instrument you did? And unfortunately, we're having a 2025 technology relying on a piece of paper

that was invented 3,000 years ago by Egyptians. So the whole system, as sophisticated as it looks like, it is based on a very old technology that hasn't modernized much. And so our job, our mission is to take that kind of very weak link and take it to the 2025. I would imagine that you'd be inundated with companies that need your help, people that need your help.

I mean, just thinking about what you said where agentic AI, we're gonna have these AI agents doing like everything, whether it's business, it's life, could be the next travel vacation. I mean, it's setting everything up that we're gonna do. This is gonna be a very interesting time. When you talk to companies though, around what you're doing, what's what is the pulse of how they feel about it? What are they saying?

Well, the companies that that suffer the most right now are companies that you would imagine from financial services, governments trying to make voting,, all the way to regulated industries like gambling, adult entertainment, social media. Those are the ones that right now they have an existential threat on their business to make sure that they can guarantee that interactions are genuine. But what's interesting is that for the first time, companies that were not in that category, you know, from telcos to energy companies are actually realizing that

it only takes a fake person, it takes a fake interaction to portray as a customer, as a, as a, or, or as an employee to get access to their systems. And it can be a massively, uh, you know, it can be a massive event that can destroy the company with reputation. It is actually mind blowing that that is a reality. And so what we're seeing is everybody's now asking, how can I make sure that my interactions with the world, I agentic and human are genuine. I mean it like you said it only takes one thing now to go viral on social media to you know destroy the stock of a company in one hour like it it you know things could just spread like

wildfire and it takes only one thing. You know, perception is very hard to create a good perception, in my opinion, but it's very easy to get a bad perception from people nowadays, from what it seems. If a company, when they start working with you, I could, the more we talk, the more I understand how big this problem is. I could see why you're solving it. So when a company starts to work with you, can you walk me through the process of that? Yeah, so when we talk to a company,

we tell them that there's three things that we excel at. First one is we've been doing AI for 10 years. There's a lot of companies that put AI into their business nowadays, but we've been doing that for 10 years kind of with a conviction that there's certain problems in the world that AI is gonna Solve them a lot better than than what humans can the second thing is the most interesting part

Which is that there's gonna be so much fraud in the next three years that I think You know the world is gonna come together and collaborate because doesn't matter how good your AI is You have to talk to each other. Governments and private companies have massive amounts of data. You have DMVs who give you a driver's license, we have the pictures, your information, and you have all these private companies that if only companies talk to each other and would say, hey, look, Daniel, with these type of device, IP, you know, is actually genuine, type of device, IP, you know, is actually genuine. If just companies talked, this problem would be solved. And so the second thing we're doing besides doing the AI

is we're building a private network, starting with the DNVs and then all the way to the companies and build these massive interconnected network that will eventually make very difficult for, um, Froster's to, uh, to defraud. But in order to get to the level of, of critical mass needed, unfortunately it's going to get, it's going to get bad. So the second thing we're doing is all these network and companies generally

are very excited about that because it's not only solving their business case. One of the best things I've ever done for my personal growth was picking up a new language. Whether you're traveling, leveling up your career, or just love learning, speaking another language opens up many doors. And Rosetta Stone makes it easier, more immersive,

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And unfortunately, the people who are more affected are the people who have the least. Because if all of a sudden you have a newer entrance, you know, a young person or an immigrant, for example, who doesn't have a lot of information in the credit bureaus. And all of a sudden, all these fraud starts, they are the ones that are going to not have access to credits or they're going to have high interest rates. And so in my view, these two things are critical. And the third thing is that you have to have a partner that is innovative and goes with you hand on hand. So so so I think companies are very excited about participating in this in this network. To me, it sounds like what you're saying is we are going into the era of collaboration. We came out of the era of competition. And

now we're going into the era of collaboration, which I'm very excited. I went from being pessimistic to being very optimistic. So thank you so much. I mean, I'm super appreciative of what you're sharing. Outside of what you're working on and outside of what you've been talking about, looking at the other problems that AI is solving, whether it's in health or wealth or a variety of things, what are you excited

about for the future in terms of what AI could solve? I think there is one of the biggest impact of AI is on voting and democracy. I mean we're seeing now a very interesting time in the world and you're seeing a lot of vote a a lot of voices, putting opinions about tariffs. And, and that's why you have to understand how important it is for people to participate in elections, be able to have trusted methods. And so the thing that I am the most excited is not only that voting is going to be digital, I think in 10 years all around the world, no more physical, no more paper. But not only that, it's going to get to a granular level where if you're very quickly want to understand, hey, what about this topic?

Do you want to vote for this specific topic that is a game changer? You're going to be able to do it at a very fast speed. You're going to be able to do it cheaper than ever. And so I think AI is going to have a massive impact into how we make decisions, whether it's at the school board, all the way to how you choose a precedent. And it's going to change the US certainly, but think about other economies and political systems around the world, how much impact that can have. We have this example where we were hired by the state of Nevada to re-verify votes that were contested.

And we were afraid. My board was against all of this. He said, you know, Trump is going to tweet against ENCODE and it's going to become the meaning too, right? But they knew what's important. We did it anyways. And both secretaries of state, republic and democrat were incredibly happy with the fact that there was a much better technology than paper that would actually instill trust and

trust in the process in Nevada. And Nevada determined two elections ago, the composition of the House. And so that blows my mind that a company, we're not unicorn, but we're pretty small on the big state of things, and that we could have an impact. Well, I mean, the era of collaboration, like you said, whether it's a bipartisan thing, it's, yeah, I mean, I get to, I have the honor of being able to travel. And like you said, I get to see how other countries are just getting into this digital state.

And 10 years, we're gonna be exponentially digital everywhere, which is gonna open up incredible opportunities like you had just mentioned which I'm very excited about So I'm very appreciative that you're here today because you gave me some very good insights I've been wondering how people are gonna solve this problem I stay up a night sometimes thinking about this just because you know this type of fraud happened to me Unfortunately, and I you know I think of like, you know, my parents who are in their 70s, 80s, like our grandparents who are 90s up to 100, like how bad is it going to be for them? And they don't even understand a lot of the technology.

So this is going to be incredibly needed for all generations. But Ricardo, if people want to get in touch with you, I'm sure there's tons of companies that need to, or people just want to find out more information about you. Personally, how can they do so? They can send me an email, amper at incode.com. And I'm happy to talk to them or add Incode Technologies in Twitter. Well, Ricardo, Incode, thank you so much

for joining us today on Founder's Story. Thank you for inviting me, Dan. making real money, like the Utah mom who built a six-figure business playing video games, or the guy earning $3,000 a month renting out mobility scooters. Online or offline, from Amazon to your own hometown, from YouTube to vending machines, The Side Hustle Show has you and your wallet covered. Subscribe to The Side Hustle Show wherever you're listening to this podcast and increase your earning power today. Ram trucks have always powered American freedom. Now with our freedom of choice pricing program, you can choose your offer, cash incentives or employee pricing for all.

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