Digital fraud at industrial scale: 2025 wasn’t great

The global battle against digital fraud has become more fraught, with cybercriminals pivoting from high-volume, opportunistic attacks to sophisticated, AI-driven operations; they’re not just harder to detect, but can cause substantially more damage as well.

An analysis of data from more than 4 million fraud attempts, and surveys of some 300 fraud and risk professions and another 1,200 end users by Sumsub, found what the identity verification firm described as a noticeable “sophistication shift” over the past year. 

Fraud involving the use of advanced deception techniques, social engineering, AI-generated identities, and telemetry tampering surged 180% year-over-year, even as the share of these incidents within the overall fraud volume increased from 10% in 2024 to 28% in 2025. Ominously, Sumsub found scammers increasingly deploying autonomous systems capable of executing multistep fraud with minimal human intervention. AI-generated documents accounted for just 2% of all fake IDs and records used in digital fraud last year. But that seemingly small share — powered by tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini — represents a concerning upward trajectory, according to Sumsub.

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