Fraud Surges in APAC's Fastest-Growing Industries--Sumsub Report Highlights a 723% Spike in Healthtech, 116% in Fintech
Fraudsters increasingly weaponize AI-powered deepfakes and synthetic identity documents to exploit the expanding digital ecosystems in APAC
Deepfake scams remain a persistent threat, Singapore sees a 1,500% surge; Hong Kong SAR jumps 1,900%
Synthetic identity document fraud grows 233% in APAC, outpacing the global increase of 195%
SINGAPORE, June 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- As Asia Pacific's (APAC) digital ecosystems continue to undergo explosive growth, some of the fastest-growing sectors are becoming prime targets for increasingly sophisticated fraud. New data released by global verification provider Sumsub, reveals that healthtech and fintech sectors are the most exposed to this new wave of AI-powered fraud, with healthtech recording the sharpest year-on-year spike across industries in the region—an alarming 723% compared to Q1 2024.
In fintech, fraud remains persistent with the second highest year-on-year rise in fraud in APAC, with 116% increase over the same period. This surge in fraud comes as both sectors experience rapid growth. Fintech in APAC is set to grow from USD 450 billion in 2024, to USD 1150 billion by 2032, while digital health is expected to expand eightfold by 2033, reaching nearly USD 488.50 billion.
But as these industries scale, so does the sophistication of the fraud they face. Fueled by generative AI, synthetic identity documents, deepfakes, and AI-driven tactics are evolving rapidly—exploiting gaps in security and compliance to trick systems and commit fraud. The use of deepfakes is particularly concerning, extending beyond election interference and business impersonation to AI-generated job scams. Singapore recorded a staggering 1,500% surge in deepfake fraud cases from 2024 while Hong Kong SAR saw an even more dramatic 1,900% jump.
As AI becomes more accessible, fraudsters are using AI-powered tools to construct synthetic identity documents, combining real data like a valid ID number with fictitious details to create a completely new, non-existent persona. In sectors like fintech and healthtech, where digital onboarding and remote verification are common, these AI-generated documents are often used to impersonate legitimate users during Know Your Customer (KYC) checks. This allows bad actors to fraudulently access financial services or sensitive health records, posing serious risks to both service providers and end users.
Globally, synthetic identity document fraud cases have surged by 195%, with APAC seeing an even sharper rise of 233%, underscoring the scale and sophistication of the threat. Several APAC markets have recorded a sharp year-on-year rise in synthetic identity document fraud (Q1 2024 to Q1 2025), with particularly steep increases in:
Philippines: 291% increase
Hong Kong SAR: 209% increase
Thailand: 188% increase
Singapore: 184% increase
Australia: 117% increase
"While fintech fraud is a familiar battleground, given the sector's long standing exposure to financial crime and its evolution alongside crypto, the scale of fraud in healthtech signals a worrying new frontier. As more healthcare services go digital, the sector's vulnerabilities are being exploited at pace, putting trust in the digital health system at serious risk. The surges in AI-powered fraud, including deepfakes and synthetic identity documents, is exposing critical flaws in traditional verification systems," said Penny Chai, Vice President, APAC, Sumsub. "To protect themselves, businesses must move beyond outdated approaches and adopt multi-layered, adaptive defenses. At Sumsub, our focus is on helping businesses stay one step ahead of fraudsters by anticipating new attack vectors and delivering smarter, more resilient full-cycle verification solution."
In response to the rapidly growing fraud risks in the region and across the globe, Sumsub will host its inaugural What The Fraud Summit to serve as a dedicated platform for industry leaders, regulators and fraud experts to have bold conversations and exchange actionable insights to beat the global fraudemic. The Summit will be held in Singapore from November 19 to 20, 2025.
Learn more about the WTF Summit and ticket details: https://sumsub.com/wtf-summit/
About Sumsub
Sumsub is a full-cycle verification platform that secures the whole user journey. With Sumsub's customizable KYC, KYB, Transaction Monitoring, and Fraud Prevention solutions, you can orchestrate your verification process, welcome more customers worldwide, meet compliance requirements, reduce costs, and protect your business.
Sumsub has over 4,000 clients across the fintech, crypto, transportation, trading, e-commerce, education, and gaming industries, including Bitpanda, Wirex, Avis, Bybit, Vodafone, Duolingo, Kaizen Gaming, and TransferGo.
Sumsub has citations in research published by global institutions such as the United Nations and Statista, as well as ongoing consultancy and engagements with INTERPOL.
View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/fraud-surges-in-apacs-fastest-growing-industriessumsub-report-highlights-a-723-spike-in-healthtech-116-in-fintech-302479869.html
SOURCE Sumsub
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Cyberway Product Innovation Platform: Empowering Enterprise Innovation Processes and Building Exceptional Product Strength
GUANGZHOU , June 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- In the fiercely competitive FMCG market, only efficient innovation can create a true competitive edge. As consumer preferences change rapidly and the market environment remains uncertain, how can companies precisely identify needs, execute efficiently, and continuously optimize their strategies? The Cyberway Product Innovation Platform empowers FMCG enterprises to achieve sustainable growth by providing powerful capabilities in pre-planning insight, in-process control, and post-launch analytics—ultimately enabling the development of exceptional product strength. Before: AI-Powered Foresight for Accurate Market Opportunity Detection AI Opportunity Discovery: Real-time industry data, user behavior, and competitor insights are captured to automatically identify blue ocean markets and unmet needs—fueling inspiration for new product planning. Accelerate Opportunity Capture: Shorten market research cycles and improve speed and accuracy of opportunity identification. AI-Driven Product Definition: Using opportunity and competitor analysis, combined with internal product knowledge bases, the system intelligently generates product concepts, optimizes configurations, and refines packaging and formulas. Agile Response: Ensure product design closely aligns with market needs and competition, allowing rapid focus on core value and improving product-market fit. End-to-End User Demand Management: A comprehensive demand management framework tracks records, statuses, and feedback, aggregating omnichannel voice of customer with AI to identify high-value & Accurate: By realizing and verifying demand in closed-loop cycles, continuously refine product performance, minimize resource waste, and pave the way for the next breakout product. During: Efficient Execution to Deliver Outstanding Products Scientific Project Management System: Integrates visual dashboards, all-in-one workbenches, and real-time notifications via Feishu, WeCom, and DingTalk for full project transparency and synchronized decision-making across teams. Core Value: Reduce communication overhead, improve collaboration efficiency, and prevent project delays. Standardized Project Workflow: Based on industry templates and task libraries, enabling tiered and structured project management tailored to channel requirements. Flexible Control: Guarantees high-quality delivery while allowing adaptive workflows, ensuring key tasks succeed the first time. Cross-Functional Online Collaboration: Integrates marketing, go-to-market, and product workflows to shorten timelines. Interlocked nodes require mutual confirmation to ensure stability and avoid cost waste. Key Feature: Enables synergistic cooperation across departments for performance greater than the sum of its parts. AI Marketing: Tracks competitor strategies and social trends in real time, dynamically generating targeted content and pricing strategies using internal knowledge. Efficient & Agile: Accelerates creative production and drives an integrated "strategy-content-pricing" engine for rapid market response. Online Knowledge Repository: A dedicated enterprise R&D knowledge base aggregating key data such as risk warnings, solutions, and technical documentation. Significant Boost: Empowers faster troubleshooting and prevents redundant errors in R&D. Comprehensive Quality Control System: Embeds IPD checkpoints and technical reviews to govern key milestones; incorporates risk management for prevention, monitoring, and post-analysis. Ultimate Goal: Ensure high-quality project delivery while minimizing potential risks. After: Data-Driven Innovation Strategy Optimization Project Review: Compare project baselines with actual execution to deeply analyze quality, timeline, and cost performance. Deeper Insights: Identify key factors that influence project success. Go-to-Market Tracking: Monitor GMV trends across e-commerce platforms, VOC on social media, and promotional campaign outcomes to pinpoint growth opportunities and risks, driving agile strategy iteration. Advanced Capabilities: Fuel product iteration and innovation, providing a core foundation for the next-generation breakout product. Data Asset Management: Leverages delivery data and gate review points to auto-update master product data, creating a unified view with field supplementation and relationship validation. Long-Term Value: Enables full-lifecycle product data management, enhancing both data quality and business utility. The Cyberway Product Innovation Collaboration Platform is a powerful enabler for FMCG enterprises to enhance product innovation with AI, reduce waste, shorten R&D cycles, and create market bestsellers. From ideation to launch and ongoing optimization, the platform empowers excellence at every stage—allowing businesses to stand out in an intensely competitive landscape. We look forward to partnering with more brands to explore new ways of innovation and co-create the next market blockbuster! Website: Email：Marketing@ View original content: SOURCE Cyberway Information Technology Co., Ltd. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Entrepreneur
a day ago
- Entrepreneur
Guardians Of Digital Trust
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. As India's digital penetration deepens across Tier I to Tier III cities, the digital economy is thriving, but so are digital frauds. According to the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) annual report, digital payment fraud surged more than fivefold to INR 14.57 billion (USD 175 million) in the fiscal year ending March 2024. KYC (Know Your Customer) scams are on the rise, with cases like a 73-year-old Mumbai woman losing INR 2 lakh and an RTO clerk duped of INR 4.35 lakh, exposing the growing vulnerabilities in the system. Amidst this landscape, IDfy is stepping up to combat fraud with Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. "We power about 60 per cent of all video KYCs in India," says Ashok Hariharan, Co-founder and CEO of IDfy. The company provides end-to-end verification services for banks, insurance providers, credit card issuers, and online merchants from employee onboarding to authenticating transactions. Yet, as Ashok points out, fraudsters are constantly evolving. "Fraudsters are always finding holes in the lock one area, they'll find a backdoor." Phishing, digital arrest scams, and mule accounts have proliferated, exploiting weaknesses in systems that rely heavily on physical KYC or less sophisticated technologies. "They target cooperative banks with weaker systems, often colluding with branch managers to bypass manual verification," Ashok adds. AI, however, is proving to be a formidable defense. "Deepfake detection, device mimicry, and intrusion attacks – we can catch all of this today," Ashok explains. By using AI models that analyse anomalies, IDfy can flag suspicious transactions such as a low-income applicant seeking a high-value loan. "A person living in Dharavi applying for a INR 10 crore loan that's anomalous," he highlights. IDfy's platform operates on four fundamental questions: Does the individual exist? Is the person the one transacting? Have they committed fraud before? Are they likely to commit fraud in the future? With AI, the company matches PAN card selfies to live photos, preventing fraudsters from impersonating others. It also cross-references court records and prior transactions to strengthen fraud detection. The need for such rigorous checks is clear. "In a test with cab aggregator platforms, seven per cent of vehicles we flagged were linked to drivers with criminal records or vehicles involved in hit-and-run cases," Ashok reveals.
New York Post
a day ago
- New York Post
Canadian tourism industry goes on offensive, as US travelers ditch Great White North
Canada's tourism industry is going on an offensive — rolling out ad campaigns in US border states to lure Americans back to the Great White North. US travel to Canada dipped by about 10% in recent months, amid the raging trade war between the two neighbors. An American tourist looks confused as he receives a warm hug from a Canadian hotel employee in a new TV ad. YouTube/Tourisme Cantons-de-l'Est Advertisement In one TV ad running across New England and New York, an American tourist – sporting a baseball cap and matching sweater tied around his shoulders – sheepishly whispers to a Canadian hotel front desk worker that he's from the land of the free. The employee looks awkwardly towards him and presses what looks like some kind of red panic button – before bursting out a smile and walking across the desk to hug him. Advertisement Other ads take more of a practical approach, trying instead to appeal to American's pocketbooks. One billboard campaign simply reminds Americans how much further their dollar will go north of the 49th parallel. '$1 USD = $1.43 CAD,' reads the billboard from Destination Ontario, which has been spotted in Detroit and Cleveland, among other border towns. 'Spend less, do more.' Americans make up more than three-quarters of tourists to Canada. Destination Ontario Advertisement American tourists make up the bulk of visitors to Canada – last summer, 78.5%, nearly four out of five visitors to the Great White North came from the US. The drop hasn't been as dramatic as Canadian tourists to the US – who've boycotted the country en masse, leading to a 30-40% fall in air and land travel. But it's sure to make a dent in the tourism industry – according to Statistics Canada, Americans spent $15.3 billion in the country last year.
