Suspected iGaming fraud transactions rose 4.5x year over year, Sumsub says

Sumsub says suspected transactions in global iGaming rose 4.5 times over the year, based on an annual report covering the period from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026 and analyzing more than 3 million fraud attempts. For PSPs and acquirers in the sector, the useful part is simple: fraud volume is up, ticket sizes are up, and AI is making the usual abuse patterns cheaper to run.

1. Sumsub’s report says the average transaction size also increased year over year, from $3960 to $6500. That matters because bigger tickets change the economics of chargebacks, bonus abuse, and account farming: the same fraud pattern now moves more money per hit.
2. The report links the worsening picture to the spread of AI, which is boosting fraudsters’ ability to run bonus abuse, opposite betting, bot creation, and multi-accounting at scale. In other words, the classic iGaming playbook is not disappearing; it is being industrialized.
3. AI-enabled fraud attempts cited in the report include synthetic faces, edited documents, template IDs, and mass application creation. For onboarding and KYC teams, that is the part to watch: the attack surface is moving from obvious fake paperwork to higher-volume, more repetitive identity manipulation.
4. Regionally, North America shows the lowest fraud activity at 0.44%, while Africa reaches 2.54%. Europe stands at a steady 1.14%. For operators and PSPs, that means fraud controls and risk thresholds should not be treated as one global setting with local labels pasted on top.