For years, the public has been told a comforting story about fraud. That scams are mostly about ignorance. That with enough warnings, enough awareness campaigns, and enough reporting, the problem will slow down.

The Sumsub Identity Fraud Report 2025–2026 tells a far more unsettling story.

Fraud hasn’t simply grown. It has evolved faster than the systems designed to stop it. What we are witnessing is not a surge of sloppy scams, but a structural shift toward fewer, quieter, and far more damaging fraud events.

As the report itself states, stable or declining fraud percentages can create a false sense of security. In reality, every successful fraud attempt now represents more preparation, more technology, and longer-term harm.

In plain terms: the scams that still work are the ones that are hardest to see, hardest to prove, and hardest to undo.

Fraud Is No Longer Opportunistic — It’s Engineered

One of the most important takeaways from the report is that fraud is no longer something that “just happens”. It is built.

Fraud-as-a-Service platforms have removed the technical barrier entirely. Deepfake generators, synthetic identity kits, document templates, and liveness-bypass workflows are now sold, rented, reused, and refined. The same fake identity can be deployed across multiple platforms, jurisdictions, and payment systems before it is finally burned.

The report documents a 180% year-on-year increase in what it defines as “sophisticated fraud” — not because criminals suddenly got smarter, but because the tools got better and cheaper.

This modern fraud ecosystem typically involves:

  • Synthetic identities, where the name, date of birth, address, and documents never belonged to a real person
  • Deepfake selfies and video, designed to pass liveness checks rather than fool humans
  • Post-KYC abuse, where accounts behave legitimately for weeks or months before being drained
  • Cross-border reuse, where identities and methods are recycled across regions
  • This is not chaotic crime. It is process-driven deception.

The Illusion of Progress: Why Falling Numbers Don’t Mean You’re Safer

A recurring warning in the report is about misreading the data.

In many regions, regulators successfully reduced low-effort fraud. Obvious forgeries declined. Blacklist violations dropped. Screenshot-based scams faded. On paper, this looks like progress.

But what replaced them is far more dangerous.

Synthetic identity fraud grew by triple digits in several regions. Deepfake-based selfie fraud became the dominant category in mature markets. Fraud rings shifted away from volume and toward precision, targeting higher-value victims and longer account lifespans.

The result is a paradox the report spells out clearly:

  • Fraud volume can fall
  • Fraud sophistication can rise
  • Total harm can increase

This explains why victims feel like they’re losing their minds. Official statistics say fraud is “under control”, yet losses are larger, investigations stall, and perpetrators vanish without a trace.

Both things are true at the same time.

Why Law Enforcement Can’t Keep Pace — Even When It Tries

This isn’t about laziness or incompetence. It’s about structural mismatch.

Modern fraud moves at machine speed. Law enforcement moves at human speed, bound by jurisdiction, due process, and legal thresholds.

Today’s fraud operations typically involve:

  • Identities that never existed
  • Disposable wallets and accounts
  • Infrastructure designed to collapse cleanly
  • Money moved instantly and irreversibly
  • Actors spread across multiple countries

By the time a report is reviewed, subpoenas issued, or international cooperation triggered, the operation has already moved on. The identity is gone. The wallet is empty. The trail is cold by design.

Even international agencies now acknowledge that AI-generated voice and video impersonation has expanded fraud into previously trusted channels — phone calls, video verification, and identity checks that were never built to withstand synthetic media at scale.

This is why “waiting for enforcement” increasingly means waiting for nothing.

The Dangerous Myth of “Just Report It”

There is a sentence victims hear repeatedly, usually from someone trying to be helpful:

“Make sure you report it. That’s the most important thing.”

Reporting does matter. But believing it is enough is one of the most dangerous myths in modern fraud.

Most victims assume that if they gather enough evidence — screenshots, chat logs, wallet addresses, transaction hashes — someone will eventually connect the dots and fix it. This belief keeps people patient, compliant, and hopeful.

The report explains, indirectly but clearly, why this rarely happens.

Modern fraud does not produce a traditional crime scene. The screenshots victims save are often artefacts of a manufactured environment, not evidence tied to a real, prosecutable entity. The face may be a deepfake. The documents may be synthetic. The platform may be a front-end shell designed to disappear.

This is why so many victims do “everything right” and still hear nothing back months later. It’s not because they failed. It’s because they reported something that was never designed to be investigated using legacy methods.

Reporting is necessary. Believing it will bring resolution is not.

The Real Shift: From Enforcement to Intelligence

For decades, fraud response followed a simple model: crime, report, investigation, enforcement.

That model assumes the crime is slower than the response.

The report makes it clear this assumption no longer holds.

Fraud prevention is shifting away from reactive enforcement and toward intelligence-led adaptation. This means focusing on patterns, reuse, behaviour, and speed — not just individual actors.

Modern prevention increasingly relies on:

  • Behavioural and device-level signals rather than static identities
  • Correlation across platforms instead of isolated incidents
  • Early disruption instead of post-loss investigation
  • Continuous monitoring rather than one-time checks

From an investigative standpoint, this explains why independent analysis, OSINT, and cross-platform documentation often surface fraud patterns long before any official warning appears.

Enforcement still matters. But it can no longer be the front line.

Why Awareness Alone Is Failing

Governments and platforms still lean heavily on awareness campaigns. Posters. Emails. Warnings telling people not to click links or trust strangers.

The report quietly dismantles this approach.

Public awareness has improved. People are more cautious. And yet fraud losses continue to rise.

Why?

Because awareness assumes the threat is recognisable.

Modern fraud does not look like the scams people are warned about. It looks professional. It looks compliant. It often looks regulated. Deepfakes don’t raise suspicion — they create reassurance. Synthetic identities don’t trigger alarms — they pass checks.

Victims are not stupid. They are responding logically to fabricated trust at scale.

You cannot out-educate an adversary that can generate infinite convincing variations faster than humans can learn new warning signs.

The Hard Truth Going Into 2026

The report does not promise relief. It promises acceleration.

By 2026, the data shows we should expect:

  • Deepfakes to move fully mainstream
  • Synthetic identities to replace stolen ones
  • Fraud-as-a-Service to further lower skill barriers
  • Real-time payments to amplify losses
  • Criminal adoption of AI to continue outpacing regulation

This means the future does not involve fewer scams. It involves fewer visible scams and more devastating ones.

Detection will increasingly be probabilistic, not definitive. Prevention will focus on reducing exposure, not eliminating risk. Recovery will remain rare.

Avoiding this truth only benefits the people exploiting it.

The Only Viable Option Left: Adapt or Be Overrun

The conclusion is uncomfortable but unavoidable.

Fraud is no longer an exception. It is a persistent feature of the digital economy.

Adaptation does not mean panic. It means changing expectations.

It means understanding that screenshots are not protection. Reporting is not resolution. Compliance is not safety. And trust must now be earned continuously, not assumed once.

The Sumsub report makes one thing clear: fraud prevention belongs to those who adapt faster than the threat evolves.

The people who don’t adapt won’t just lose money.

They’ll keep believing the system failed them — without realising the system they trusted no longer exists in the form they imagine.

About the Author

I’m DANNY DE HEK, a New Zealand–based YouTuber, investigative journalist, and OSINT researcher. I name and shame individuals promoting or marketing fraudulent schemes through my YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Every video I produce exposes the people behind scams, Ponzi schemes, and MLM frauds — holding them accountable in public.

My PODCAST is an extension of that work. It’s distributed across 18 major platforms — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, and iHeartRadio — so when scammers try to hide, my content follows them everywhere. If you prefer listening to my investigations instead of watching, you’ll find them on every major podcast service.

You can BOOK ME for private consultations or SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS, where I share first-hand experience from years of exposing large-scale fraud and helping victims recover.

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