Businesses have gotten better at detecting fraud, but fraud is becoming accessible to more people, a new report has revealed, with emerging technologies ramping up the arms race between threat actors and defences.

Yoti’s Identity Fraud Report delved into the trends in fraud over the last two years, noting the transformative influence AI has had on the threat landscape.

Fraudsters have become more effective and efficient in committing scams and producing fake identity documents thanks to AI. The rise of deepfakes and the quality of fraudulent documents has widened access, allowing less-skilled threat actors to exploit the system.

The widespread ease of creating fraudulent documents has also driven prices down on the dark web, with sophisticated national IDs and driving licenses produced in seconds for as little as £12.

The study also highlighted the difficulty in tracking the rise and fall of fraud throughout the years – as detection gets better, and therefore more fraud is reported, this does not necessarily equate to a larger mass of fraud being committed. It is therefore difficult to truly track the rate of fraud increase as we can only measure what is detected.

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It did point out, however, that as low-level fraud becomes increasingly accessible, it is more likely to grow in volume as more people take advantage of new tools.

The landscape has also evolved in the last two years: in 2022, Yoti’s security centre saw more impersonation attempts, but in 2023, it saw an increase in the number of fraudulent documents in use.