Digital fraud is going through a new stage marked by artificial intelligence (AI), deepfakes and the massive automation of attacks. This was warned by the Canadian cybersecurity expert Simon Marchand during his recent visit to Spain, where he participated in a specialized event organized by Veridas.
With more than 15 years of experience in sectors such as banking, telecommunications and technology, Marchand has become one of the most recognized voices in the fight against digital fraud. Throughout his career he has held strategic positions in companies such as GeoComply and Microsoft.
In dialogue with La Razón, the specialist warned that the world is facing “a critical scenario” due to the rapid professionalization of cybercrime and the ease with which today anyone can access sophisticated fraud tools.
“We have seen a professionalization of cybercrime over the last decade,” Marchand explained. According to the expert, one of the most worrying factors is “the growing interest of the general population in participating in these activities together with an explosion of tools designed so that anyone can use them easily.”
The expert recalled that digital fraud has evolved rapidly in recent years. Initially, transactional fraud related to stolen credit cards predominated, but the focus subsequently shifted to identity fraud, driven by massive data breaches, cryptocurrencies, and the emergence of illegal markets on the dark web.
“That consolidated a structured and resilient criminal supply chain,” he said.
Marchand located another turning point during the Covid-19 pandemic, when forums and platforms proliferated that disseminated information and tools that were also used to easily commit fraud. Later, the emergence of language models based on artificial intelligence further facilitated the development of malicious software and new types of scams.
Now, he says, the challenge reaches an even greater dimension with the so-called “Agentic AI.” “We are reaching a new milestone with the arrival of Agentic AI, which enables the discovery of vulnerabilities and the execution of attacks on an industrial scale,” he said.
Added to this is a phenomenon that he considers especially alarming: the open dissemination of fraud methods on social networks such as Instagram, TikTok or Reddit. “We are facing a critical scenario,” he insisted.
However, Marchand rejects the idea that the evolution of deepfakes makes biometrics an obsolete technology. On the contrary, he maintains that advanced biometric systems will continue to be a key piece in fraud prevention.
“Current deepfakes are good enough to fool any human being,” he admitted. However, he clarified that this does not necessarily imply that they can violate high-security business biometric systems.
As he explained, modern biometric algorithms analyze hundreds of signals simultaneously to validate identities, far beyond the capacity of human perception. “It is precisely the layering of these various technological elements that offers the most robust defense against emerging AI-driven threats,” he said.
The expert also defended the need to develop multi-layer security architectures, capable of reducing risks even when a specific technology presents vulnerabilities. “If the fact that a technology had a single vulnerability was reason enough to stop using it, we wouldn’t use phones, computers or payment cards,” he exemplified.
During the meeting organized by Veridas in Spain, Marchand insisted that both companies and governments must accelerate their investments in fraud prevention and adapt their defense models to a much more dynamic and automated scenario.
“Fraud has continued to evolve for decades, but the AI tools hitting the market today mean that attacks will evolve at a speed never seen before,” he warned.
In his opinion, traditional strategies will no longer be sufficient in the face of new waves of attacks driven by artificial intelligence. For this reason, he defended the need to place “human beings at the center” of cybersecurity strategies.
This implies, he explained, not only verifying the identity of those who carry out digital transactions through biometric authentication, but also guaranteeing that behind each interaction there is a real person and not a simulation generated through deepfakes.
“We need to ensure that it is a human and not a deepfake who is interacting with our organizations,” Marchand concluded.