Trust has become the world’s most vulnerable infrastructure, yet most people don’t realize we’re already at war to defend it.
Every online interaction, phone call, password reset, remote job interview, and even a pickup or delivery now raises the same basic question: is the person on the other side really who they say they are?
Global businesses and governments in the AI era face a war where identity is the weapon, the attackers are invisible, and the battlefield is the infrastructure we rely on for daily connected life. AI has accelerated fraud and made sophisticated deception accessible to any bad actor.
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President and Chief Commercial Officer, Socure.
Criminal rings, nation-state adversaries, and even ordinary people can now make fraud attempts against people and businesses at massive scale. Often, the money they take funds other criminal activities, or even military programs for rogue states.
Socure’s own network saw an 8,000% increase in AI-accelerated fraud over the past year, a number that firmly demonstrates that fraud has evolved from back-office risk to strategic business threat.
Unsafe identities
Most people would be shocked by how unsafe their identity actually is. Major data breaches have exposed private and sensitive information like names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, emails, and more. And fraudsters aren’t starting from zero anymore. AI can be used on top of real data to create hyper-realistic deepfakes and synthetic identities that can’t be caught through traditional fraud signals.
I spent more than a decade in the U.S. Army, with much of that time in Special Operations. There, I learned what asymmetric threats look like up close. AI-accelerated fraud has the same hallmarks: low-cost attacks, fast adaptation, distributed networks, and targets that don’t even realize they’re under attack until the damage is already done.
Our fraud fighting research team at Socure discovered one fraud operation that purchased 340 domain names, created more than 24,000 fake identities, and launched more than 35,000 identity attacks on a single company in a matter of weeks. The ring avoided traditional linkages: no repeated emails, phone numbers, addresses, or other notable identifiers tied the attacks together. The pattern only became visible by connecting the infrastructure behind the attacks.
This is just one example. With AI as a partner, the enemy is evolving quickly, from identity theft farms with hundreds or thousands of phones running scams around the clock, to people coerced into becoming fraud mules for North Korea-linked laptop schemes.
An unseen war
This is a war that most people don’t see, but they are feeling the impacts every day. Fraud breaks trust and the burden of proof is on the consumer. Businesses are suspicious of trustworthy customers, while customers can’t trust most of the messages they receive.
This paradigm forces the entire digital economy to spend more time proving what used to be assumed: that the person on the other side is real.
I know because it has happened to me.
Someone once used my personal information to open a business account at a major bank. I work in this industry. I had frozen my credit and it still happened. I spent weeks calling, disputing, waiting, and wondering what else they might try to do in my name. Even after the matter was investigated and closed, the unsettling feeling always stayed with me.
Beyond the money, the human toll is real. Victims lose time, peace of mind, and trust. In the worst cases, identity crime can lead to a national security crisis, no matter the country. It’s clear why this is a war we have to win.
But the fight is bigger than any one company, or any one country. The lesson I learned in Army Special Operations applies here: it takes a network to defeat a network. You can be the best bank, the best fintech, the best government agency, but if you’re fighting a networked enemy with only your own data, you’re still fighting in a silo.
That is exactly what fraudsters want: each company sees just one piece of the attack, so no one has the ability to connect the dots.
Organized fraudsters
The fraudsters are already organized. The defenders have to be one step ahead and band together. That means lawful, privacy-preserving shared intelligence across global businesses, governments, financial institutions, technology providers, and infrastructure companies.
When one defender sees a fake face, a fake document, a mule pattern, or a fraud ring’s infrastructure, that insight should help protect everyone else.
The urgency is not only about today’s attacks. Quantum computing is on the horizon and it is bound to accelerate fraud even further than AI has. The window to build stronger defenses is closing.
World War Fraud is here. If we fight it together, we win. If we can’t come together around a shared understanding of AI-accelerated fraud and its true scale, we risk seeing trust between organizations and people fractured forever.
We’ve tested, reviewed, and ranked the best identity theft protection.
This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.
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