The Sumsub report, detailed in an official press release distributed by PR Newswire, found that the gap between the highest regional fraud rate in Africa <\/strong>(2.54 per cent) and the lowest in North America (0.44 per cent) was 5.8 times in the first quarter of 2026. Asia-Pacific recorded the sharpest improvement, with its fraud rate falling 45 per cent from 3.49 per cent in 2024 to 1.92 per cent, while Europe’s fraud rate remained stable at 1.14 per cent, despite 41 per cent of detected fraud involving deepfakes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Globally, the igaming fraud rate reached 1.53 per cent of all verification attempts in Q1 2026, up 18 per cent year-on-year and nearly 40 per cent since 2024. Sumsub also reported that suspicious transaction <\/strong>volumes increased 4.5 times between the first quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, while the average suspicious transaction value rose to US$6,500 (\u20ac6,002) from US$3,960 (\u20ac3,664). Legitimate user verification also became twice as fast over the same period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In South Africa<\/strong>, igaming fraud increased more than threefold during the second half of 2025. C\u00f4te d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Malawi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo also recorded the highest igaming fraud rates in Africa, while Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda showed declining fraud trends by the end of 2025. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Commenting on the findings,\u00a0Jarryd Jensen, Sumsub’s regional director for Southern Africa, said fraudsters are increasingly misusing real personal data, synthetic\u00a0identities<\/strong>\u00a0and AI-generated content, while South Africa has seen the largest increase in deepfake-related activity, according to CNBC Africa.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Sumsub report found that fraudsters now take 4.6 times longer to complete verification attempts than legitimate players, make 20 per cent to 30 per cent more verification attempts and increasingly rely on AI-enhanced documents, deepfakes, face swaps<\/strong>, account farms and other advanced techniques. ID card fraud increased 27 per cent globally since 2024, with 2.1 per cent of submissions identified as fraudulent, while passports remained the most commonly forged document type, with a fraud rate of 2.2 per cent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kris Galloway, iGaming Product Evangelist at Sumsub, said the industry is seeing a “huge amount of AI-generated <\/strong>or AI-assisted fraud content.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n He said: “Even when many of these attempts are low-quality individually, together, they create enormous operational pressure on verification systems, manual review teams, and fraud operations. AI dramatically lowers the cost and effort required to commit fraud at scale, and professional fraud groups are already taking advantage of it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sumsub also reported that 97 per cent of detected fraud in Africa was intercepted during the selfie (liveness) verification stage<\/strong>, underscoring the role of biometric verification in detecting fraudulent verification attempts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The report is based on millions of identity checks conducted across the igaming industry between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2026, as well as more than 30 interviews with industry experts, fraud and compliance specialists<\/strong>. Sumsub said its methodology has also been used by researchers at Statista, the European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and INTERPOL<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\nAI fraud gets smarter<\/strong> <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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