By Andrei Skvarsky.
Global verification statistics published by London-based compliance-as-a-service firm Sumsub late last year suggest that online identity fraud attempts in the world economy grew in number by more than 50 per cent between 2021 and 2022.
Sumsub said in a report that 1.7 per cent of millions of verified online transaction attempts or service requests in multiple industries worldwide proved fraudulent in 2022. The 2021 fraud attempt percentage had been 1.1 per cent.
E-sports, a booming industry involving computer game competitions usually watched by fans, was the main target of identity fraud in 2022, according to the report, which recorded the findings of anonymous studies in 21 sectors of the world economy covering the years 2021 and 2022.
Fraud schemes accounted for 2.9 per cent of verified cases in e-sports in 2022 compared with 1 per cent in 2021.
Fraud attempts in the cryptocurrency industry and banking more than doubled year-on-year to 1.5 from 0.7 per cent and to 1.4 from 0.6 per cent respectively.
Fraud attempts in the real estate sector went up to 1.4 from 0.9 per cent.
E-commerce, though not at the top of fraudsters’ target list, experienced 13 times as many fraud attacks in 2022 as the year before – an increase to 1.3 from 0.1 per cent of verified cases.
ID cards accounted for 80 per cent of fake document types used by fraudsters, the report said.
The majority of the cards had been issued in one of three countries – Vietnam, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Vietnamese, Bangladeshi and Pakistani cards made up 9.4, 7.7 and 5.8 per cent of the total respectively, the report said.
The United States moved in in a big way in 2022 as a source of fake identification – schemes based on counterfeit American IDs accounted for 2.5 per cent of all fraud attempts that year compared with 1 per cent in 2021.
Fraudsters use increasingly sophisticated technology. For instance, deepfakes, convincing imitations of people’s faces or voices, “have seen a breakthrough in terms of quality and commercial availability”, the report said. Deepfake technology has become cheaper to acquire, it said.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.