AI is making identity fraud cheaper, faster, and easier to scale, putting pressure on e-commerce companies to rethink identity checks performed at a single point in time.
Fraud prevention and identity verification firm Microblink found that attackers are increasingly using AI to alter legitimate identity documents rather than creating convincing fakes from scratch. Its analysis also found that portrait forgery, in which an attacker replaces or manipulates the photograph on an otherwise legitimate identity document, accounted for roughly 60% of document fraud failures observed in the U.S. and nearly 65% in Canada.
Microblink's approach combines document authentication, biometric facial matching, liveness detection, and other risk signals to assess identity throughout a customer's interaction with a business rather than relying solely on an initial verification.
"Fraudsters no longer need to build convincing fake identities from scratch. They can modify legitimate credentials quickly, making traditional verification approaches increasingly difficult to rely on," Microblink CEO Hartley Thompson III told the E-Commerce Times.
Moving Beyond One-Time Verification
