Face-Swapping Tools Pose Elevated 'Know Your Customer' Risks

Easy-to-Use Deepfake Services for Criminals Rapidly Improving, Researchers Warn Mathew J. Schwartz (euroinfosec) • January 20, 2026

Financial firms' fraud and risk teams must bolster know-your-customer safeguards in the face of increasingly effective deepfake technology, new research warns.

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Rapid improvements in deepfake generation and other tools available to fraudsters are already challenging the integrity of a variety of remote identity checks, including biometric "liveness" tests, and the problem is set to get worse, says a report tracking cybercrime trends and strategies for countering them, published by the World Economic Forum's Cybercrime Atlas project.

Especially when layered together, tools and techniques for defeating identity checks already pose "financial, operational and systemic risks for any institution that relies on digital trust," including to comply with know-your-customer requirements, the report says.

Fraudsters' interest in the latest artificial intelligence-enabled tools and their ...