South Africa’s online gambling sector is growing fast — and so is the fraud attached to it. New data from identity verification firm Sumsub shows iGaming fraud in South Africa more than tripled during the second half of 2025, part of a broader trend that has made Africa the world’s highest-fraud region for online gaming, according to the company’s iGaming Fraud Report 2026. That surge is prompting operators to reassess not just how they verify players, but how they move money — and a growing number are looking at blockchain-based payment rails as part of the answer.
The scale of the problem
Sumsub’s report, based on an analysis of more than three million fraud attempts and identity verification checks between 2024 and the first quarter of 2026, puts Africa’s iGaming fraud rate at 2.54% in Q1 2026 — 66% above the global average and the highest of any region tracked, ahead of Europe, Latin America, North America and Asia-Pacific. Globally, fraud rates rose nearly 18% year-on-year, while the volume of suspicious transactions increased more than 4.5 times, with the average suspicious transaction value climbing from roughly $3,960 to more than $6,500.
Jarryd Jensen, Sumsub’s regional director for southern Africa, attributes much of the acceleration to increasingly sophisticated, AI-assisted fraud tooling — synthetic faces, edited identity documents, and templated identities generated at scale. Notably, 97% of fraud detected across the continent is intercepted at the facial biometric, or “liveness,” verification stage, indicating that criminals are moving away from crude forged documents toward more convincing synthetic identities and stolen real ones.
