The State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report states that crypto fraud has shifted from isolated document abuse to automated, lifecycle-driven attacks across platforms.
According to Sumsub’s State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report, operational discipline has become a defining competitive factor as platforms face a more advanced and persistent fraud environment.
The report suggests that fraud is no longer best understood as a series of isolated onboarding incidents involving fake documents or stolen identities. Instead, it has become a continuous, lifecycle-driven threat that evolves alongside the user journey. Although the global fraud rate stabilised at 2.19% in 2025, that plateau remains well above the 1.5% recorded in 2023, indicating that organised, automated fraud has become a more durable feature of the market.
The underlying pattern has also changed. Attackers are moving away from basic document abuse and toward repeatable, system-level tactics that target multiple stages of the customer lifecycle. These operations increasingly combine social engineering, synthetic identities, and coordinated mule networks to bypass conventional controls.
In this environment, fraud is less about individual bad actors and more about networks that can test, adapt, and scale. Artificial intelligence has intensified this shift. Generative tools are helping fraudsters produce more convincing identities and automate attacks more efficiently, while platforms are simultaneously turning to AI to defend themselves. Moreover, 57% of crypto firms now prioritise AI-powered fraud detection, making it the leading prevention focus across the industry.
Regional patterns also underline how uneven this threat landscape has become. Asia-Pacific recorded a 65% year-on-year increase in fraud in 2025, as attackers targeted fast-growing markets and newly launched products where controls may be less mature.
North America moved in the opposite direction, with fraud volumes falling by 38% across the US and Canada. However, the decline did not necessarily indicate a less dangerous environment. Instead, the report suggests that attacks in the region have become more targeted, more harmful, and more difficult to detect.
Detection capacity also remains inconsistent across the industry. Despite heightened awareness, 15% of platforms said they were still unsure of the extent of fraud’s impact on their business, pointing to persistent blind spots in internal monitoring.
In response, crypto companies are changing how they think about onboarding and risk. Verification accuracy is now prioritised by 74% of firms, overtaking speed as the most important factor in onboarding design. This does not mean speed no longer matters. Rather, speed is increasingly being achieved through better orchestration, allowing low-risk users to move through near-instant verification flows while escalating suspicious signals to deeper checks.
Global average verification time fell from 22 seconds in 2024 to 19 seconds in 2025, while pass rates remained high at 94%. The industry is also converging on hybrid identity models that combine internal decision logic with specialist third-party tools for document verification, biometrics, and liveness detection.
The report concluded that fraud resilience is no longer a compliance side function. As crypto platforms mature, sustainable growth will depend on systems that integrate identity, behaviour, and transaction monitoring into a single intelligence layer.
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