In this episode of “No Free Lunch,” host Greg Stewart delves into the complex world of identity fraud with guest Tom Schoon, head of partnerships for Africa at Sumsub. The discussion centers around Sumsub’s 2025 Identity Fraud Report, which highlights a significant shift in the fraud landscape across Africa.
The report reveals alarming growth rates in deepfake incidents and advanced fraud techniques, particularly in countries like Zambia, DRC, and Malawi. Tom explains how Sumsub’s compliance platform helps combat these issues by providing full-cycle verification and ongoing monitoring.
The conversation also explores the challenges of digital literacy and mobile adoption in Africa, emphasising the need for robust fraud prevention systems and real-time reporting to regulators. The episode concludes with a call for unified efforts and education to mitigate fraud risks.
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Key quotes from Tom Schoon
- “We’ve done a massive interrogation of the markets in order to create this report. From a data source perspective, we’ve gone over 4 million fraud attempts. We’ve analyzed over 4 million attempts across Africa. We’ve interviewed and chatted to over 300 fraud and risk professionals.”
- “High mobile adoption and low digital literacy are the main factors driving fraud in Africa. Mobile money and mobile phones have had a massive adoption rate in Africa. Everyone’s got a phone. And in fact, most Africans have got two phones. Those phones, on the whole, are smartphones.”
- “Prevention is a much better strategy to adopt. Right now in Africa, there are no good strategies of prevention. And what that means is that these companies, the enterprises, the financial service providers, trading companies, telcos, et cetera, all have their own regulator. And they all report to the regulator too late. They need to do this in real time.”
- “Fraud mitigation is not as complex as people think. There’s some simple things that we can put into place, especially in Africa, would impact fraud in making sure that it didn’t happen quite as quickly.”
