The What the Fraud Summit 2025, taking place on November 19 and 20, at Andaz Singapore, will bring together leading professionals from the fintech, cryptocurrency, technology, and compliance sectors to explore evolving fraud trends, regulatory shifts, and future-proof strategies to protect businesses and consumers from cyberthreats and fraud.
Hosted by identity verification specialist Sumsub, the inaugural event will welcome more than 500 industry leaders and practitioners for two days of focused discussions, hands-on workshops, and collaboration. It will address some of the toughest challenges in fraud prevention, AI security, regulatory shifts, and compliance, uniting regulators and industry to develop coordinated strategies.
The What the Fraud Summit 2025 will open on November 19 with Workshop Day, featuring three expert-led sessions by Sumsub executives. These sessions will allow participants to gain certifications and practice real-world skills through live demonstrations, case simulations, and interactive exercises.
The first session, “Inside the Fraud Kitchen: Cooking Up Modern Scams”, will take a closer look at some of the most sophisticated fraud tactics making waves today, including deepfakes, forged documents, impersonation during verification, and account takeovers. Participants will get to see exactly how these schemes work with a live deepfake demo, and dive into interactive exercises to spot fake documents and deepfakes, followed by a hands-on investigation.
The second session, titled “How to Create Smarter KYC Journeys”, will explore what it takes to design a smart, secure, and user-friendly onboarding process. It will start with the theory, walking through best practices that balance fraud prevention, speed, and conversion, to then move on with a practical challenge: building an onboarding flow with defined logic, validation rules, and user experience optimizations.
Finally, the third session, “AML Investigations and Case Management: Detection, Triage, SOF/SOW Checks”, will walk through the full anti-money laundering (AML) investigation process step-by-step, from spotting unusual activity and detecting anomalies to triaging alerts, creating cases, and gathering critical information from documents, transactions, and payment methods. This session will cover key checks like source of funds and source of wealth, filing suspicious activity reports, and keeping accurate records, as well as ongoing monitoring and updating risk classifications.
The Main Summit Day, on November 20, will feature keynotes and panel discussions anchored on four core pillars:
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and fraud: Understanding AI-driven scams and defense strategies.
- Digital identity: Securing identities while maintaining accessibility and compliance.
- Compliance: Navigating new regulatory landscapes, risk intelligence, and financial crime prevention.
- Fintech: Addressing cross-border transactions, innovation in fintech, and emerging regulations in crypto.
Topics will include the future of digital payments, covering real-time payments, mobile wallets, embedded finance, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), among other themes; the role of adaptive risk scoring and innovations driving real-time fraud prevention; the rise of AI agents in modern fraud schemes and emerging challenges in identity verification and authentication; the crypto regulatory landscape in Asia-Pacific (APAC); and the rise of fraud-as-a-service operations across APAC and scam factories.
Speakers will include:
- T Raja Kumar, President, Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 2022-2024
- Lawrence Chan, Group CEO, NETS
- Dr. Lawrence Wee, Director, Business and Ecosystems, IMDA
- Guy Sheppard, Head of AI Strategy and Adoption, Standard Chartered Bank
- Vincent Mok, Group Chief Risk Officer, GXS Bank
- Chee Keong Teo, Associate Partner, Asia-Pacific, Assurance Blockchain, EY
- Claudia Hui, Head of Compliance, Singapore, Revolut
- Karthik Ramanathan, AP Head of Network Services, Mastercard
- Varun Srivastava, Head of Cyber Security Operations, APAC, UBS
- Caryn Leong, Regional AML Director, APAC, ACAMS
The lineup will also feature senior leaders from organizations including AWS, London Stock Exchange Group, Coinbase, TRM Labs, Trust Bank, and Wirex.
Beyond the workshops and sessions, the What the Fraud Summit 2025 will offer networking opportunities with leaders shaping the future of fraud prevention and compliance, providing a premier platform for industry professionals to forge meaningful business connections.
APAC’s escalating fraud threat
The inaugural What the Fraud Summit comes at a time when APAC faces rising exposure to financial crime. According to Sumsub’s recent 2025 Global Fraud Index, APAC is now the epicenter of vulnerability, ranking fourth globally in fraud exposure, and trailing Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.
In particular, leading digital economies, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan, are experiencing a surge of fraud, recording significant declines in their fraud protection rankings. This reveals a widening gap between rapid digitalization and effective fraud defenses.
Most notably, Southeast Asia is emerging as a hotspot for large-scale online scams. Across the region, criminal networks operate “scam factories” that use romance and investment schemes to defraud victims on an industrial scale. Those conducting the scams are often trafficked foreign nationals, trapped and forced to carry out online fraud under threat of torture.
Earlier this week, the US and the UK announced sanctions targeting one of these networks operating illegal scam centers. The US imposed sweeping sanctions on 146 targets within the Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization (Prince Group TCO), a Cambodia-based network led by Cambodian national Chen Zhi that operates a transnational criminal empire through online investment scams. The US also cut off Huione Group, another Cambodian financial conglomerate, from its financial system for laundering billions in proceeds of virtual currency scams and heists on behalf of malicious cyber actors.
US losses from online investment scams have surged in recent years, exceeding US$16.6 billion to date.
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Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by EyeEm via Freepik
