New research from Shufti finds that Asia-Pacific’s most digitally advanced economies record the region’s highest identity fraud rates.
According to the latest report by identity verification company Shufti, digitally advanced economies in the Asia-Pacific see the highest identity fraud rates, challenging the assumption that mature digital infrastructure means safer onboarding.
Based on the fraud-signal rate by market, Shufti found that Indonesia experienced the highest with 22.82%, followed by New Zealand with 20.57%m and 20.18% in India.
Similarly, developed economies like Australia, Japan, and Singapore also have rates of 19.49%, 18.28%, and 17.59%, respectively, making these economies equally at risk for fraud signals.
The problem? The density of digital-first businesses scaling together. According to Shufti, more remote KYC activity means a larger attack surface, more attempts, and a higher share of fraud caught at the verification step. This comes even as APAC contributes close to 60% of global growth and population-scale infrastructure, with India’s DigiLocker and Singapore’s Singpass placing identity verification at the centre of everyday transactions.
Additionally, the region’s linguistic complexity could also play a part in the rise of fraud cases. The report argues that most verification systems were not built for a number of languages, including Khmer, Burmese, Thai, Korean Hangul, simplified and traditional Chinese, and three concurrent Japanese scripts, each with its own formatting quirks that generic OCR engines struggle to parse.
In response, APAC countries are now tightening their regulations further. India’s RBI strengthened liveness and deepfake-detection expectations in its August 2025 KYC update, and Singapore’s MAS raised supervisory expectations on AI-generated identity fraud. Australia’s AML/CTF Amendment Act 2024 has also brought lawyers, accountants, and real-estate professionals into mandatory identity verification.
Read more about the report here.
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