Synthetic identity fraud is one of the fastest-growing fraud types globally, where fraudsters fabricate a person who never existed.

They typically stitch together a blend of real, stolen, manipulated and invented attributes until the composite is convincing enough to enter through the front door.

This shift moves away from years of defensive fraud management thinking. Fraud prevention has almost always focused on stolen credentials.

Now, attackers no longer need to steal an identity, as they can manufacture one.

Research from LexisNexis Risk Solutions backs this, indicating that more than one in ten frauds (11%) now involve a synthetic identity, representing an eightfold global YoY increase.

The most unsettling challenge for fraud prevention teams here is that there’s no longer a victim to raise an alarm immediately.

Generative AI and deepfakes are making these profiles all the more convincing, and manufactured identities are becoming remarkably difficult to detect.

Research from LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ latest ebook, Stopping Synthetic Identity and Deepfake Fraud, shares that 85% of synthetic identities examined were not flagged by third-party models.

What’s worse is that synthetic identity fraud is no longer isolated to a single market. It is happening more across regions and industries, and quickly becoming a global issue.

Which leaves an uncomfortable question for any fraud strategy still optimised for downstream threats: the exposure now sits upstream, at the point of onboarding.

Traditional fraud strategies are starting to falter as synthetic identities are largely invisible at onboarding, which is the exact place point-in-time verification collapses.

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