Sumsub’s third annual iGaming Fraud Report has recorded a staggering 4.5x increase in suspicious transaction volumes between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026.
The average value of those suspicious transactions has also risen sharply, climbing from $3,960 to $6,500 over the same period.
The research draws on more than three million fraud attempts and points firmly to artificial intelligence as a key driver of the escalating problem.
AI is enabling fraudsters to scale up schemes involving bonus abuse, opposite betting, bot creation, and multi-accounting at a pace not previously seen.
Kris Galloway, iGaming product evangelist at Sumsub, described the situation in stark terms: “Right now, the industry is seeing a huge amount of AI-generated or AI-assisted fraud content.”
Galloway went further, calling the current landscape “an ‘industry-wide DDoS attack of AI-slop’, if we’re willing to put it into stronger terms.”
Sumsub, which provides identity verification services to the iGaming industry, tracked the global iGaming fraud rate rising to 1.53% in Q1 2026, an 18% year-on-year increase.
That figure also represents a 40% increase from 2024, underlining just how rapidly the fraud landscape is deteriorating across the sector.
One of the more telling findings in the report is that fraudulent verification attempts are now taking 4.6x longer than legitimate ones to complete.
Sumsub says this points to “more deliberate, manual attacks: fraudsters making repeated attempts, testing document combinations, and navigating liveness (facial biometric) checks step by step.”
This pattern suggests a more calculated and methodical approach from bad actors rather than opportunistic, scattershot attempts to slip through verification systems.
Galloway noted that AI-assisted fraud attempts now include synthetic faces, edited documents, templated identities, and mass-generated applications at scale.
He added: “AI dramatically lowers the cost and effort required to commit fraud at scale, and professional fraud groups are already taking advantage of it.”
Geographically, Africa recorded the highest regional fraud incidence at 2.54%, while North America fared best with the lowest rate of just 0.44%.
Europe appears to be holding its ground against the industrialisation of fraud, posting a relatively modest 1.14% fraud rate that has remained largely stable across all three years of Sumsub’s reporting.
However, Europe does present a striking qualitative finding, with deep fakes accounting for 41% of fraud attempts in the region, the highest proportion recorded globally.
The APAC region, which previously recorded a fraud rate of 3.49%, has seen a notable improvement, with the figure falling sharply to 1.92% since 2024.
