Vendor claims deepfake fraud ‘doubles’ in North America

Instances of deepfake fraud doubled in North America between 2022 and Q1 2023 according to a new report from London-based identity verification platform sumsub.

This proportion jumped from 0.2% to 2.6% in the U.S, and from 0.1% to 4.6% in Canada.

Simultaneously, printed forgeries, which represented between 4% to 5% of all fraud in 2022, dropped to just 0% in the most recent quarter.

The most popular type of fraud in the U.S. and Canada as per the report was liveness bypass, a method of fraud where criminals swap in or edit biometric data. This accounted for 34% of fraud cases in the U.S. and 22% of those in Canada.

Coming in second was the use of edited ID cards, playing part in 22% of fraud cases in the U.S. and 24% of those recorded in Canada.

Forged ID cards were the third most popular method, playing a part in 17% of fraud cases in the U.S, compared to 18% in Canada.

In addition, Sumsub found that the top three industries affected by fraud in the U.S. were IT services for both 2022 and Q1 2023, classifieds, and crypto.

Sumsub isn’t the only identity verification vendor who has been looking to highlight the incoming risks posed by deepfake fraud in recent months.

Security analyst vendor Recorded Future released a report “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Do Crime” detailing how voice cloning, leveraging platforms such as for platforms like Microsoft’s TTS AI model, VALL-E, is becoming an important emerging risk vendor.

The barrier to becoming a deepfake fraudster isn’t particularly high with some of the solutions which are currently available.

Vice journalist Joseph Cox used an AI-generated voice break into his Lloyds Bank account, leveraging ElevenLabs’s text-to-speech (TTS) conversion product.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  deepfakes  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification  |  Sumsub