Glossary
Account kiting
Also called: check kiting, deposit kiting
One-sentence definition
Account kiting is when a merchant moves money between their own accounts to artificially inflate deposit volume on the statement they submit for underwriting.
Key takeaways
- Kiting double-counts the same dollars as separate deposits.
- Common across multi-account merchants: business + personal, operating + savings, primary + secondary entities.
- Single-statement detection is hard; cross-account analysis reveals it.
- The flag is a self-transfer signature, not a fraud signal in isolation — context matters.
Why it matters for MCA underwriting
An applicant moving $30,000 from a savings account to a checking account creates a $30,000 deposit in the checking statement. Submitted alone, that deposit looks like revenue. When the underwriter only sees one statement, the dollar gets counted twice — once when it left savings, once when it arrived in checking.
Kiting is one of the easiest revenue inflation moves to execute and one of the hardest to spot manually. Cross-account analysis catches it; eyeballing one PDF rarely does.
How Vyaso detects account kiting
Vyaso flags self-transfers between the merchant's own accounts using description analysis, fuzzy name matching against the merchant's business name, and cross-account analysis when multiple statements are uploaded. The output: a kiting flag with the implicated transactions and a transferred-volume estimate.