How artificial intelligence is industrialising digital identity fraud across Africa
As Africa’s digital economy grows, fraud is scaling with it. A new report shows AI now drives most biometric fraud, while attacks increasingly target logins and account actions rather than onboarding.
The foreword to Smile Identity’s 2026 Digital Identity Fraud in Africa report (PDF) opens with a striking assertion.
“Africa’s digital economy is expanding faster than the security infrastructure that supports it,” it notes.
To illustrate this imbalance, the report notes that the share of Africans who own a financial account has nearly doubled over the past decade, rising from 34% to 60%. While this surge has accelerated economic growth and expanded access to financial services, it has also widened the attack surface for fraud. As more individuals and businesses move online, bad actors are finding new opportunities to exploit funds and sensitive information.
From financial services to eCommerce and gaming, fraud is on the rise across sectors. And as the rapid mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence continues, fraudulent activity is evolving in scale and sophistication, introducing new and complex risks to Africa’s digital ecosystem.
One of the most consequential shifts in fraud in 2025 has been the dramatic reduction in the cost of executing it, driven by artificial intelligence. According to the report, AI-driven schemes accounted for 69% of all biometric fraud cases tracked during the year, as generative AI tools enabled fraudsters to launch attacks at a scale previously unseen in the industry.
“What once required specialist skills and significant time can now be produced cheaply, repeatedly, and at scale,” the report states. “When fraud is cheap, attackers don’t need to succeed on the first attempt. They test systems continuously and iterate until they break through.”
The widespread adoption of AI has led to a sharp escalation in the scale and intensity of fraud attempts, many of which target the same identities. In one month alone, more than 160,000 attempts were linked to just 100 faces reused across multiple platforms.
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In one instance, a single identity was used to initiate over 1,000 account registration attempt...
