Impersonation, emulators and ecommerce lead sophisticated fraud trends: Veriff

Online fraud rates have held above 4 percent for the third year in 2025, according to new research from Veriff, but detecting it is getting harder. Impersonation remains the most common type, with one in 25 identity verification attempts online an attempt to pose as someone else, the company’s research shows.

Veriff’s Identity Fraud Report 2026 highlights the shift to more sophisticated attempts, including emulator attacks that mimic devices to bypass security measures like device intelligence and behavioral biometrics. It also shows ecommerce marketplaces are the most frequent target for fraud, with a rate of 19.2 percent in 2025.

The company has been emphasizing the point about the sophistication of fraud attacks, as have others in the industry like Sumsub and Veridas.

Stopping them comes down to answering three key questions, Veriff says. Is the customer or employee real? Does the customer or employee bring value or cost to your organization? Has the answer to either of the first two questions changed?

The answers are provided through selfie biometric onboarding with liveness detection and a government-issued ID, cross-linked risk analysis and biometric authentication, respectively.

The boom in sophisticated fraud has already driven a massive spike in authentications carried out by Veriff.

The report breaks down digital identity fraud data from the year, looks into impacts in the financial services, online retail and other sectors. It reviews regional differences in fraud patterns and offers predictions for the year ahead.

“Across industries, online fraud attempts are clearly continuing their sharp upward trajectory, with our latest findings coming on the heels of two consecutive years of 20 percent increases,” says Ira Bondar-Mucci, fraud platform lead at Veriff. “In addition, we’re seeing a clear trend of fraudsters deploying increasingly sophisticated attack methods as they move away from older techniques that are now more conspicuous.”

Veriff has also published a series of white papers and reports on fraud threats with Biometric Update, making its Fraud Index for 2025, UK Fraud Industry Report, Future of Finance, Identity Fraud Report 2025 and “Future of e-Commerce Report 2025” available for free with registration.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital identity  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification  |  onboarding  |  synthetic identity fraud  |  Veriff