Global deepfake incidents involving AI targeting crypto at peak levels, industry report

AI-driven fraud targeting crypto is gaining steam with the industry a target of 88% of exploits.

“With AI-driven fraud remaining the most prominent challenge across various industries, crypto is the main target sector (representing 88% of all deepfake cases detected in 2023), followed by fintech (8%).”

Sumsub research

The findings are published by sumsub research a company that provides online identity verification tools.

The report also adds that between 2022 and 2023 the number of deepfakes detected globally across all industries increased 10-fold.

In terms of regional differences, there was an increase of 1,740% surge deepfake cases in North America, the primary target for hackers. While Asia Pacific scams increased 1,530%, compared to 780% in Europe (including the UK), 450% in the Middle East and Africa and 410% in Latin America.

The country experiencing the most deepfakes is Spain, the most fake document in the world is the UAE passport, while Latin America is the region where fraud has increased across all countries, the report also found.

The crypto industry has already faced a series of hacks and thefts this month. At the beginning of the month, an attacker undermined the internal exchange price of oPEPE and ended up stealing more than $2m from Onyx protocol.

In addition, the Poloniex cryptocurrency exchange suffered a hacker attack.

Poloniex’s owner Justin Sun confirmed the hack and said that Poloniex will compensate users losses at their own expense.

While earlier this year another attack occurred on a crypto wallet that was linked to the largest by market capitalization exchange Binance. According to the analysis, the cybercriminal promptly exchanged the stolen funds for Ethereum (ETH). To cover his tracks, he used services such as FixedFloat and ChangeNow.