Synthetic-identity fraud was the fastest growing type of fraud in 2025, accounting for 11% of total fraud globally, an eight-fold increase from 2024, says LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ annual cybercrime report.

The explosion in synthetic identity fraud—which occurs when a criminal blends pieces of information belonging to multiple consumers to craft a fake identity— represents a shift by fraudsters away from short-term opportunism to long-term goals, since it can take months to establish a synthetic identity, the report says.

“With no victim to immediately raise the alarm and high potential returns, synthetic fraud is proving attractive to fraudsters globally,” the report says. “Fraudsters are investing time to learn and utilize the latest technologies like generative AI to create ever more sophisticated synthetic identities that appear authentic, even including fraudulent historical backup data.”

LexisNexis’s cybercrime report analyzed more than 116 billion transactions through the LexisNexis Digital Identity Network between January and December 2025.

Latin America has become a hotbed of synthetic identity fraud, accounting for 48.3% of fraud in the region, according to LexisNexis. “Synthetic identities, once perceived as a predominantly American problem, are now very much a global issue,” the report says.

One reason Latin America is seeing a surge in synthetic-identity fraud is that criminals are increasingly using these identities in the gaming, e-commerce, and communications, mobile, and media industries. “The most significant change at an industry level in 2025 is that the use of synthetic identities is being widely reported in e-commerce … and gaming and gambling,” says the report.

In addition to the rise of synthetic identity fraud, criminals have become better at using malicious bots to impersonate consumers. Bot technology can now mimic legitimate human actions, such as how a consumer moves a cursor around a login screen, “with a high degree of plausibility to fool the latest behavioral fraud-detection tools,” the report says.

The use of malicious bots increased 59% in 2025, with significant peaks seen throughout March, April, and August last year. “In our 2025 data, several things were apparent. First, we saw a significant increase in bot activity mimicking human behavior, revealed clearly by unusual peaks in the Identity Abuse Index,” the report says. “Second, we saw evidence of more sophisticated human behavior impersonation (through the use of Bézier curves to make mouse movements seem more natural) which we detect through enhanced behavioral analysis,” the report says.

E-commerce remains a popular target for fraudsters. The e-commerce fraud-attack rate grew 64% year over year in 2025, and the attack rate at login, where fraudsters look to gain control of customer accounts, jumped more than twofold, according to LexisNexis. Within e-commerce, gaming and gambling sites saw a 76% increase in fraud attacks globally last year.

Despite the rise in the use of synthetic identities and malicious bots to commit fraud, first-party fraud—consumers defrauding organizations—remains the leading source of fraud globally for the second consecutive year. First-party fraud accounted for 38.3% of all reported fraud in 2025.

A growing area of concern for businesses is the increasing use of artificial intelligence-based agents that act on a consumer’s behalf, the report says. In 2025, agentic traffic rose 450% and was used primarily for credit card payments and logins at gaming and gambling sites.

What makes AI agents a potential fraud threat is that their digital signatures differ from those of humans and traditional bots. As a result, businesses will need “to better understand intent as these agents become mainstream for good users as well as being adopted by fraudsters,” the report says. “Understanding agent intent is a rapidly evolving area that involves emerging data-sharing frameworks, across different stakeholders, that can confirm or authenticate the person behind the agent. This will continue to mature in 2026.”


Source: digitaltransactions.net