Account Authentication Using Synthetic Merchants

A method comprising:

• receiving, from a user device, a request for access to an account associated with a user;
• generating, based on one or more name elements from a plurality of real names one or more synthetic names by:
• providing, as input to a trained machine learning model, the one or more synthetic names, wherein the trained machine learning model is trained to predict a believability of names;
• and
• receiving, as output from the trained machine learning model, a predicted believability of the one or more synthetic names;
• generating, based on synthetic transaction data, a synthetic authentication question, wherein the synthetic transaction data indicates a transaction conducted by the account and associated with at least one of the one or more synthetic names;
• and
• providing the user device access to the account based on a response to the synthetic authentication question.

One or more non-transitory computer-readable media storing instructions that, when executed by one or more processors, cause a computing device to:

• receive, from a user device, a request for access to an account associated with a user;
• generate, based on one or more name elements from a plurality of real names one or more synthetic names by:
• providing, as input to a trained machine learning model, the one or more synthetic names, wherein the trained machine learning model is trained to predict a believability of names;
• and
• receiving, as output from the trained machine learning model, a predicted believability of the one or more synthetic names;
• generate, based on synthetic transaction data, a synthetic authentication question, wherein the synthetic transaction data indicates a transaction conducted by the account and associated with at least one of the one or more synthetic names;
• and
• provide the user device access to the account based on a response to the synthetic authentication question.