MarCoPay, a Philippines-based electronic payments platform built for seafarers and their families, has turned to identity verification specialist Sumsub to harden its defences against fraud and meet the demands of the Philippines’ Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act.

Under the partnership, Sumsub will support MarCoPay across customer onboarding, ongoing compliance checks and transaction monitoring. The aim is to give MarCoPay a unified picture of fraud signals as they emerge in real time at every stage of the customer journey, allowing the platform to run continuous risk management rather than isolated checks.

The pressure to act is mounting. The Philippines continues to supply more seafarers than any other nation, creating a large, globally mobile workforce whose earnings and families depend on secure financial services. Sumsub’s Identity Fraud Report 2025-26 found that deepfake attacks in the Philippines climbed 61% year-on-year in 2025, placing the country among the fastest-growing markets for such attacks in Asia-Pacific.

Globally, complex multi-step coordinated fraud jumped 180% over the same period, underlining the threat posed by AI-powered schemes. AFASA’s tougher fraud-management rules, in force since June 2026, now require financial institutions to strengthen real-time monitoring and fund-recovery capabilities.

To onboard customers securely, MarCoPay is deploying Sumsub’s document-based identity verification, Liveness Detection and AML Screening. Sumsub can check more than 14,000 identity document types issued across over 220 countries and territories, giving seafarers who routinely cross borders the coverage they need.

Its proprietary Liveness Detection confirms genuine users within seconds and flags spoofing and deepfake attempts. The system builds a 3D FaceMap to prove a person is physically present during verification, then relies on that map to authorise later actions such as logins and payments.

Source link