#194: The Fraudsters Have Agents Now with Sumsub's Ilya Brovin

Hey everyone,Ilya Brovin is Chief Growth Officer of Sumsub. I caught up with him at Bitso Business’ Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss how AI is changing the economics of identity fraud.By the company’s own numbers, Sumsub onboards 12 to 15 million people a month across roughly 4,000 clients, which makes for a useful vantage point on what fraud actually looks like right now.What Brovin describes is a shift from humans faking documents to agents doing it programmatically, at a speed and volume that older detection methods were never built for.🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversationBits & Borders is Presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub’s internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub’s customer base.Some of the key global highlights include:* Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).* Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.* Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.Key Takeaways:* The meaningful shift in fraud is not deepfakes themselves but who is deploying them. Deepfake tooling got cheap and widely available over the past two years, and what changed more recently is that criminals now train agents to run the verification attempts, probing systems for loopholes at a scale humans could never match.* Brovin argues deepfake detection should be the last line of defense rather than the first. The model belongs at the end of a chain of 10 to 20 signals covering device, location, IP, injection attempts, document templates and even the wall someone stands against for a selfie. If the detection model is doing the work, something upstream already failed.* The Sumsub ID product is pitched as Stripe Link for KYC. Users store validated documents in a secure wallet and reuse them for subsequent verifications, with the actual documents held off-chain and a privacy-preserving attestation published on-chain.* Identity for AI agents must resolve back to human identity. Sumsub is not building agent protocols, but Brovin expects every protocol that emerges, on either fiat or crypto rails, to need verification of the principal behind the agent and the specific mandate that principal granted.* He makes a direct case against instant settlement for retail users. Urgency is the lever social engineering pulls, and he argues for a middle ground that stays 24/7 without being instantaneous, giving people a few minutes to think without returning to multi-day TradFi timelines.I enjoyed this conversation with Ilya and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on Linkedin.Have a great weekend everybody.-AWSRecent Episodes Get full access to Bits and Borders at bitsborders.substack.com/subscribe