RESTON, Va., Dec. 15, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Regula, a global developer of identity verification (IDV) solutions and forensic devices, published a new summary of insights from major global research sources, revealing how identity fraud accelerated across consumers, businesses, and public institutions throughout 2025. The findings reveal a clear pattern: AI-driven attacks have become increasingly sophisticated, credential exposure has reached record levels, and digital trust has eroded across the ecosystem.
The insights are part of Regula’s latest feature, 2025 Identity Fraud by Numbers, which consolidates data from trusted sources, including the Identity Theft Resource Center, Mastercard, IATA, World Bank, and others — alongside Regula’s own studies to help organizations prepare for emerging threats in 2026.
According to Regula’s analysis, identity fraud in 2025 was not a set of isolated events. It was a cross-ecosystem problem driven by AI, massive data exposure, and uneven protection standards. The evidence indicates that attackers are now operating at an industrial scale. They use automation, impersonation, and credential-based attacks to target individuals, organizations, and vulnerable populations.
Consumers face rising anxiety
Identity crime became more intrusive and more damaging for individuals. AI tools made scams harder to detect. Examples include deepfake voice calls that imitate family members and synthetic identities that pass as legitimate users. This drove a shift in behavior: consumers expect to be targeted, and now view fraud attempts as unavoidable. As trust declines, people are more likely to stop using a company's service after a security incident. They also choose banks and payment providers based on fraud-prevention strength rather than on convenience or pricing. In 2025, trust became a measurable competitive factor.
Businesses deal with authentication weaknesses
Organizations continued to face identity-driven attacks due to weak authentication. Many companies still use outdated or inconsistent login/password-based methods. Attackers use large volumes of breached identity records to reconstruct complete digital profiles. This enables high-impact attacks with simple methods. For example, a single compromised employee password can lead to phishing, account takeovers, or access to customer data. In most major incidents, attackers did not rely on infrastructure exploits — they succeeded because identity controls were the weakest part of the security stack.
Governments see vulnerabilities expanding
Government agencies observed rising losses, especially among older adults. Fraudsters used publicly leaked identity information to impersonate officials, tax agencies, or postal services. This made investment scams and impersonation schemes highly convincing. Seniors were disproportionately affected and experienced the highest financial harm. At the same time, the global identity gap remains a major structural risk. Hundreds of millions of people still lack formal identity documents. This increases their exposure to fraud, limits access to essential services, and creates opportunities for exploitation.
Building Fraud-Proof Identity Checks with Document and Biometric Liveness
“Across all datasets, one conclusion stands out clearly: identity has become the defining security challenge of our time. AI is powering a new wave of fraud, digital trust now determines whether customers stay or leave, and billions of leaked identity attributes are enabling attacks at unprecedented scale. Organizations can no longer rely on passwords or fragmented verification tools. In 2026, resilience will depend on a well-orchestrated IDV approach that includes: multi-factor identity verification, stronger credential protection, and a shift toward proactive, rather than reactive, fraud prevention,” says Henry Patishman, Executive Vice President of Identity Verification Solutions at Regula.
In today’s environment of deepfakes, injection attacks, and rapidly evolving fraud tactics, the first and most essential step in identity verification is knowing that you’re dealing with a genuine physical document and a real person.
That’s why robust liveness checks and signal-source validation are becoming non-negotiable. With Regula Document Reader SDK and Regula Face SDK, organizations can verify the authenticity of documents and biometrics, validate file metadata, detect signs of tampering, and ensure that captured data originates from a trusted device. NFC verification also plays a critical role here — it anchors the process to a physical document whose chip can be verified independently on the server side, removing blind trust in the user’s smartphone.
All of these checks can be orchestrated and adapted to your business processes with the Regula IDV Platform, an end-to-end workflow orchestration and identity lifecycle management solution that unifies every tool you need to ensure greater flexibility and control, as well as stay ahead of modern fraud.
In general, the principle is simple: the more verification layers you have, the safer you are.
Read the full analysis
To explore the complete set of IDV fraud insights and statistics that will impact 2026, visit the Regula Blog and read the 2025 Identity Fraud by Numbers feature.
About Regula
Regula is a global developer of forensic devices and identity verification solutions. With our 30+ years of experience in forensic research and the most comprehensive library of document templates in the world, we create breakthrough technologies for document and biometric verification. Our hardware and software solutions allow over 1,000 organizations and 80 border control authorities globally to provide top-notch client service without compromising safety, security, or speed. Regula has been recognized in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification.
Learn more at www.regulaforensics.com.
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8ae72a81-1b25-487a-8baf-6d7bfd2ddd09
Contact: Kristina – ks@regula.us
