A report by AU10TIX, an ID management and verification provider, has revealed a massive campaign involving thousands of fraud attempts using AI-generated variations of a single passport.
In its fourth-quarter global ID fraud report, which draws on insights from millions of transactions processed across 249 countries, AU10TIX said between May and December 2023, organized criminals executed more than 22,000 fake onboarding attempts using variations of the same passport.
Here are some other key findings:
- In Q3, the company reported a shift in attacks from the cryptocurrency sector to the payments industry, likely in response to new EU regulations. Although this trend continued in Q4, it was impacted by the rising value of Bitcoin throughout the quarter, which attracted both legitimate traders and scammers. As a result, the percentage of global attacks targeting the cryptocurrency sector rose from 23% to 32%. Still, it remained far below the 47% spike of Q2.
- Even within the cryptocurrency sector, divergent trends were exhibited across regions. In Europe, the implementation of new regulations has been impactful, resulting in no increase in attacks despite the jump in Bitcoin value. However, North America and APAC have no such regulations and thus experienced heightened activity as fraudsters attempted to exploit the Bitcoin frenzy and go unnoticed in the flux of trading. Consequently, payments sector identity fraud in North America dropped by 30% as some fraudsters turned their focus back to cryptocurrency.
- The payments sector remained responsible for nearly half of all global Q4 fraud attempts.
