Sophisticated online fraud techniques are growing more accessible to unskilled attackers, driven by AI tools and fraud-as-a-service platforms, according to Sumsub’s latest Identity Fraud Report.
“[W]hile the volume of attacks remains staggering, the nature of fraud is shifting,” the researchers write.
“The ‘low-effort’ schemes of yesterday, such as sloppy document forgeries and crude copy-paste jobs, are increasingly filtered out by more sophisticated verification systems. Yet fraudsters have adapted, repurposing the same democratized tools into smarter, more professionalized operations. Today, deepfake-enabled liveness bypasses, synthetic identity rings, and carefully orchestrated post-KYC abuse are far more common.”
AI capabilities are built into many popular phishing platforms, allowing crooks to purchase the ability to launch sophisticated attacks.
“Fraud-as-a-service providers now bundle these models into ready-made production kits, enabling even low-skilled actors to generate industrial quantities of high-quality forgeries,” the researchers write.
“This marks the leap from AI as a helper to AI as the engine behind industrialized, scalable fraud. It accelerates both quantity (millions of attempts still flood the system) and quality (more sophisticated, harder-to-detect attacks).”
As legitimate AI tools improve, attacks that abuse these tools will get an upgrade as well.
“In 2025, we saw the first appearance of AI fraud agents — autonomous systems that combine generative content, scripting, and behavioral mimicry to execute full verification attempts end-to-end,” the researchers write. “What began as scattered experiments this year is expected to become a major wave in 2026, as these agents evolve into self-operating fraud bots capable of adjusting their strategies in real-time.”
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Sumsub has the story.
