Smile ID, a leading digital KYC provider in Africa found that 80% of fraud attacks on the continent target national IDs, making them Africa’s most targeted document type after completing over 100 million identity verifications in the past five years.

The most vulnerable ID is the Tanzanian, with 32% attempted fraud. According to the research, “With more national ID documents in circulation than ever before, the chances of them getting lost or stolen get increasingly higher by the year, exposing holders to potential document fraud.”

African firms employ driver’s licences, international passports, voter’s cards, and national identity numbers (NIN) for KYC and customer onboarding. Fraudsters have used counterfeit, disguised, or expired documents or stolen IDs to evade the onboarding procedure for various platforms, especially financial institutions.

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Smile ID says, “Many firms fight document fraud in two ways. Businesses can check the ID’s legitimacy via ID authority databases or by comparing it to authentic templates and security features for irregularities.”

The biometric component in our document verification technology identified 37% of document fraud. The digital KYC supplier reported 2024 that more than a third of ID document fraud remains undetected without biometric checks.

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Smile ID, Dojah, and other startups sometimes face National ID service disruptions when verifying user information to prevent fraud. Smile ID reported 6% downtime in 2022 using national ID databases. Databases were unavailable for over 10% of 61 days out of 365.

“The African government needs to build a basic ID infrastructure that is easy to use and reliable,” Smile ID CEO Mark Straub told Bendada last year. “At Smile ID, we have built “fail safes” that make sure that all the traffic sent to us is processed because the national ID infrastructures go down all the time, sometimes throughout the day, and that is a real point of friction for everyone.”

Unlike before, women’s IDs are targeted almost as much as men’s.

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African biometric fraud

More African businesses use biometrics for identity verification and fraud protection, but fraudsters are still trying to get around it. “Biometric fraud is usually more complex than document fraud and difficult to catch without advanced prevention tools,” Smile ID adds.

Fraudsters use no face match, spoofing, duplication, and generative AI (such as deep fakes) to manipulate biometrics. In 2018, Smile ID detected 48.5% of biometric fraud assaults as no facial match, followed by spoofing.

Biometric verification is four times more safe than textual verification, according to the Pan-African KYC supplier. “Layering biometric authentication on top of textual verification during onboarding offers advanced protection for businesses,” Smile ID said in its research.