Incognia Reveals Global Fraud Is Hiding in Plain Sight as Scam Cities Industrialize Financial Crime

New insights reveal how scam cities and fraud farms are increasingly connected to legitimate financial accounts around the world.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Incognia, the leader in cross-device risk intelligence, is shedding new light on the industrialization of global fraud. Across Southeast Asia, large-scale "scam cities" are operating more like businesses than traditional criminal operations, with teams of workers using hundreds or thousands of devices to target consumers worldwide with scams ranging from sextortion and pig-butchering to financial fraud.

Increasingly, that industrialized infrastructure is reaching into the legitimate financial system. Fraud networks can recruit "mules" to open legitimate accounts and later hand them over to operators in other countries, allowing organized criminals to use verified accounts without having to steal an identity outright. Recent Incognia data shows the scale of the shift:

• 81% of financial institutions report rising mule account handover fraud.
• 64% have suspected or confirmed cross-border mule account handovers, suggesting some institutions may already be hosting accounts operated by overseas fraud networks.
• At the same time, investigators are documenting the physical infrastructure behind these networks: large compounds where workers operate clusters of devices and accounts from the same locations—patterns that can be difficult to see when each account is evaluated independently.

Together, these findings point to a new challenge for financial institutions - fraud may not begin with a suspicious identity or a fraudulent account. It can begin with a legitimate account that becomes part of an industrialized operation somewhere else in the world.

"These aren't just scam operations - they're businesses built to scale fraud," said Erin West, founder of Operation Shamrock and former prosecutor, who has visited fraud compounds in Cambodia and works with global law enforcement on these networks. "You have people, technology and infrastructure working together to target victims around the world. Once you understand what's happening on the ground, you can see why the financial system is such an important part of the operation."

Fraud farms have existed for years across industries, using large numbers of devices to create accounts, generate fake activity, commit bonus abuse, facilitate collusion and carry out other schemes. What is changing is the scale of these operations and their growing connection to financial crime.

Rather than stealing identities outright, fraud networks can recruit mules to open legitimate accounts and later hand them over. Workers inside overseas compounds can then operate multiple accounts at scale, even though those accounts may have passed every identity check at onboarding.

"Fraudsters have figured out how to make the individual account look legitimate," said André Ferraz, CEO and Co-Founder of Incognia. "But when you look at device, location and behavioral signals across accounts, you can start to see the infrastructure behind the fraud. A cluster of devices operating from one location can tell a very different story than any single account viewed on its own."

Global fraud may be hiding in plain sight, but the infrastructure behind it is leaving clues. From the devices operating inside overseas compounds to legitimate accounts being accessed across borders, organized fraud networks can create patterns across location, device and behavior. For financial institutions, those signals offer a way to see the operation behind activity that can look legitimate one account at a time.

For more information about Incognia's approach to fraud prevention and risk intelligence, visit Incognia.com.

About Incognia
Incognia provides cross-device risk intelligence for companies that rely on trusted digital interactions. Its technology blends location behavior, device integrity, and behavioral analysis to create a risk signal that cannot be faked at scale and shows whether a user is trusted or risky. With real-time assessments and actionable data, Incognia helps organizations stop repeat and large-scale fraud while reducing friction for legitimate users.

SOURCE Incognia