African fintech companies are facing a new wave of digital fraud as attackers increasingly target existing accounts instead of creating fake ones, according to a new report by Smile ID. The report, titled 2026 Digital Identity Fraud in Africa, analysed more than 200 million identity checks conducted across 35 African countries and found that fraud attempts now focus mainly on account logins, password resets and other authentication processes.
According to the report, a single fraud network used about 100 stolen facial identities to launch more than 160,000 verification attacks on fintech platforms in one month in 2025. The study shows that fraud at authentication stages is now five times more common than fraud during account registration, exposing a weakness in systems that were mainly designed to verify users only when they first sign up.
Chief Executive Officer of Smile ID, Mark Straub, warned that the rise of artificial intelligence tools is making digital fraud cheaper and more scalable. The report found that 69 percent of confirmed biometric fraud cases in 2025 involved AI generated techniques such as deepfakes, synthetic faces and face swapping, allowing criminals to test verification systems repeatedly until they find vulnerabilities.
The report also noted that fraud networks are building large pools of stolen identities which can remain inactive for months before being used for financial crimes. As Africa’s digital financial sector continues to expand, the study urged fintech companies to treat identity verification as continuous security infrastructure rather than a one time onboarding check, particularly as more than 200 million new financial accounts have been created across the continent in the last decade.