Deepfake scams drive USD $40 billion fraud warning

identifAI has published its first report estimating that deepfake-enabled scams generate USD $40 billion a year in financial fraud. It says video and voice cloning now account for nearly two-thirds of observed synthetic fraud cases.

The Milan-founded start-up said its research tracks global incident telemetry through August 2026 across banking, insurance and corporate settings. It argues that synthetic media has moved beyond online misinformation and is now routinely used in fraud targeting financial institutions and corporate treasury teams.

The findings show video synthesis accounts for 42.7% of deepfake fraud incidents, and audio-based voice cloning accounts for 21.9%. Together, the two formats represent 64.6% of all observed cases in the company's dataset.

Identity fraud accounted for 17.6% of incidents, with synthetic media linked to one in every 100 identity verification check failures globally. The report also identified social media platforms as a key source of material for fraudsters, naming X and LinkedIn as major channels for collecting video and audio of senior executives from interviews, podcasts and public appearances.

Target markets

The United States was the largest target or source market for deepfake fraud incidents, accounting for 34.1% of cases. India followed with 7.7%, while the United Kingdom accounted for 6.6%.

Those figures place the UK among the countries facing a relatively high volume of synthetic fraud activity, particularly as banks, insurers and large employers increasingly rely on remote verification and digital approvals. The report links that exposure to the concentration of financial services activity and the public visibility of corporate leaders whose voices and images can be harvested online.

Among the examples cited was the theft from engineering group Arup, where a finance worker transferred HKD $200 million, or USD $25.6 million, after joining a live video conference in which every participant was allegedly a real-time deepfake. The report also referred to ABN AMRO, where attackers used identity morphing and deepfake liveness bypasses to open 46 fraudulent accounts before they were detected, and to an attempted attack on Ferrari using a cloned voice of its Chief Executive Officer in WhatsApp audio messages.

Regulatory focus

The publication comes as regulators in Europe and the US tighten scrutiny of synthetic media and impersonation risks. identifAI pointed to the EU AI Act, including Article 50 transparency provisions, and to US rules that give authorities greater scope to act against deceptive synthetic content.

The debate has widened beyond consumer deception to operational and compliance risk for institutions that still rely on visual checks, voice recognition or human review in high-value transactions. Financial groups have invested heavily in know-your-customer and anti-fraud systems, but the report argues that older biometric and document-based checks can be bypassed by tools that inject manipulated media into onboarding and approval workflows.

identifAI said criminal groups are also packaging these techniques into "Fraud-as-a-Service" offerings, allowing less sophisticated operators to buy toolsets for impersonation and verification bypass. If sustained, that model could lower the barrier to entry while increasing the volume of attacks on banks, insurers and corporates.

The company also extended the warning to automated finance systems. As AI agents begin handling routine actions such as payments or account tasks, it said the trust problem shifts from authenticating a human user to verifying the inputs guiding an automated decision.

"This report establishes our inaugural global benchmark for tracking synthetic fraud. What emerges from our findings is that while the first generation of deepfakes fooled our eyes, the next generation is engineered to fool our financial systems, specifically targeting banks and insurance companies," said Marco Ramilli, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of identifAI.

"Deepfake detection can no longer exist as a post-incident forensic tool. Instead, research shows it needs to be embedded as an active, zero-trust security layer inside every critical financial workflow. There is a massive opportunity for financial institutions to act early and hedge this growing risk," Ramilli said.

The business was founded by cybersecurity specialists Marco Ramilli and Marco Castaldo. It says it can determine whether audio, video or image content has been generated or manipulated by AI, and raised EUR €5 million in a funding round led by United Ventures after a previous EUR €2.2 million seed round.

Kate Burns, Vice President, EMEA, at identifAI, said the spread of synthetic impersonation is no longer limited to banks. "Fraud used to need your password. Now it needs your face and a few seconds of your voice - and for most people, both are already online," Burns said.

"This isn't just a banking issue. The same attack works on a hospital, a council or a grandparent. The cost of faking a person convincingly has escalated, and our instinct to trust our own eyes hasn't moved at all. The cost of synthetic fraud is already being passed down to consumers through higher banking fees and insurance premiums, as financial institutions grapple with these new forms of threats," she added.

Patrick Dawson, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Wave Claims, said: "Financial institutions across London and Europe are witnessing a fundamental pivot from basic credential theft to real-time synthetic identity injection. identifAI's findings underscore that relying on human review during high-value wire transfers or remote onboarding is a major compliance vulnerability and has become a thing of the past. Today, corporates urgently need to invest in verification protocols that can outperform the latest fraud tech. In our eyes, it's a small cost to offset potentially massive losses."