Deepfake attacks strike every five minutes amid surge in digital document forgeries

As cyber criminals continue to adapt their techniques to find new ways through defenses, AI-assisted fraud is growing increasingly sophisticated and frequent, as evidenced by a new report. The findings reveal a deepfake attack happened every five minutes in 2024, while digital document forgeries increased 244% year-over-year. 

The data is from the Entrust Cybersecurity Institute’s 2025 Identity Fraud Report. 

Digital identity verification is a vital part of the onboarding process, essential for preventing fraud and financial crime. This first moment of interaction provides organizations with the opportunity to establish trust in an individual’s identity from day one. Now in its sixth year, the annual report shares insights gained on the state of remote identity fraud at onboarding over the past year to understand today’s rapidly evolving fraud landscape. The report identifies digital document manipulation and deepfakes as the biggest growing threats going into 2025. 

Key findings include: 

Digital Over Physical: The New Era of Document Fraud Emerges 

For the first time, digital document forgery surpassed physical counterfeits as the leading method of fraud in 2024, with digital forgeries accounting for 57% of all document fraud. This marks a 244% increase from 2023 and a staggering 1,600% surge since 2021 when almost all fraudulent documents were physical counterfeits. With the rise in AI-assisted fraud, bad actors are now able to leverage more sophisticated attacks on documents, particularly National ID Cards (40.8% of attacks globally). Threat actors are taking advantage of “as-a-service” platforms for phishing, fraud, and ransomware that facilitate knowledge sharing of “best practices” and the use of generative AI (GenAI) tools to create sophisticated digital forgery and injection attacks. 

Basic fraud tactics give way to sophisticated, hyper-realistic deepfake 

The report identifies AI-assisted deepfakes as an area of particular concern for global organizations, as basic fraud tactics that are relatively easy to discern, like phishing, are quickly giving way to hyper-realistic AI-generated deepfakes and synthetic identities. The rise in face-swap apps and GenAI tools has allowed fraudsters to perform and scale increasingly believable biometric fraud attacks. The capacity for malicious usage is widespread and includes fraudulent account openings, account takeovers, phishing scams, and misinformation campaigns. Deepfake attacks occurred at a rate of one every five minutes in 2024. 

Financial services become top target for bad actors 

The top three most targeted industries in 2024 were all related to financial services, with cryptocurrency seeing almost double the number of fraud attempts compared to any other industry (9.5%), followed by lending and mortgages (5.4%), and traditional banks (5.3%). Crypto platforms saw the highest rate of fraudulent activity attempts, which have risen 50% year-over-year, from 6.4% in 2023 to 9.5% in 2024. This could be due to Crypto reaching an all-time price high in 2024, making it very attractive to fraudsters. At the same time, traditional banks experienced a 13% increase from last year in fraudulent onboarding attempts, which happened as inflation rates were also high, leading to a rise in lending and mortgage scams.