Digital fraud is advancing at an accelerated pace and challenging trust in the global financial system. In Brazil, increasingly sophisticated scams have become part of consumers' daily lives. Among the most common practices are opening bank accounts with false documents, online purchases in the name of third parties, hacking into payment accounts, cloning cards, and even using videos manipulated by deepfake technology to deceive family, friends, and companies.
According to the report “The Future of Finance 2025” by Veriff , a leading identity verification company that recently opened a technology hub in São Paulo, the number of fraudulent attempts grew by 21% in the one-year period between 2024 and 2025. In Brazil, 69.5% of companies already use artificial intelligence to combat fraud, while 16.5% are in the process of implementation—but the scenario is still worrying. According to a recent survey by Serasa Experian, the country registered more than one million attempted frauds for the second consecutive month in 2025, which reinforces the urgency of investments in more rigorous identity verification and risk prevention solutions.
Financial services remain among the top targets for criminals. According to Veriff's research, in the last year alone, one in twenty verification attempts involved someone trying to impersonate another person—a type of scam that, without the support of adequate technology, can generate losses of millions of dollars for businesses and consumers. In the United States, 35% of companies in the sector reported financial losses, with 13% indicating an impact of up to 20% of their annual revenue. During the same period, 47.5% of consumers reported having suffered some type of online fraud.
Kaarel Kotkas, founder and CEO of Veriff, one of the 25 most influential young entrepreneurs in Northern Europe, explains that the financial sector remains a prime target for criminals due to the quick financial returns and adds that, to prevent crime, it is necessary to anticipate it. "Our mission is to ensure that real people have access to services, while criminals are stopped in an intelligent and scalable way, even in the face of increasingly sophisticated threats."
AI as both threat and solution.
Artificial intelligence, however, appears as a game-changer in this scenario. Although it is more present in attacks — 60.5% of respondents reported an increase in the use of AI in scams and 31.94% of Americans have already been victims of fraud using deepfakes — the technology has also become one of the main allies in risk prevention. Solutions such as digital identity verification and biometrics are already a reality in 83% of companies, and another 81% plan to expand the use of these technologies.
Digital trust as a competitive advantage
For Andrea Rozenberg, general manager of Veriff in Brazil, digital trust has become a determining factor for competitiveness, especially in high-risk sectors such as finance, payments, and cryptocurrencies, which have fraud rates almost twice the global average. “The future of financial services will be defined by companies' ability to protect their customers in an increasingly digital environment. Biometrics is a powerful tool, but it cannot act alone. Authentication needs to combine multiple layers of verification and risk intelligence to truly protect the global financial ecosystem. The combination of AI verification, biometrics, and seamless authentication is essential to building secure and reliable experiences,” she states.
Currently, solutions already exist that can identify manipulated images, perform advanced biometric analyses, detect abnormal behavioral patterns, and reinforce user authentication in real time, making artificial intelligence the main shield against fraud. "With the increasing sophistication of attacks, the expectation is that, in the coming years, technologies such as deepfake , continuous authentication, and real-time identity verification will become even more strategic for protecting companies and consumers," reinforces Andrea.
