More than half of identity verification checks across property and professional services are still carried out manually according to new data from SmartSearch.
Last week the Financial Ombudsman Service reported a sharp rise in online investment and employment scams, logging 31,300 scam complaints in 2025, including 20,000 involving authorised push payment (APP) fraud.
Compliance specialists warn that the figures expose weaknesses in how businesses verify customers at onboarding and throughout the client relationship.
SmartSearch surveyed 1,000 decision-makers across finance, property, legal and accounting sectors and found that 54% of identity checks remain manual, with just 46% conducted digitally.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
In an environment where property transactions involve large sums and tight timeframes, the reliance on manual checks raises concerns over fraud exposure and regulatory risk.
For estate agents, letting agents and conveyancers handling deposits, completions and rental income flows, the data highlights the importance of robust anti-money laundering (AML) and identity verification frameworks.
Collette Smith (main pic ture, inset), Chief Customer Officer at SmartSearch, says: “The criminal opened an account. They passed basic checks. They looked legitimate. And then they used that legitimacy to defraud victims. The question isn’t whether these platforms had verification processes.
“It’s whether those processes could catch what criminals are deploying in 2026: AI-generated identities, deepfake documents, and synthetic profiles that pass traditional checks without triggering any alarms.”
RISK SIGNALS
She adds: “Manual processes can’t scale to catch the volume and sophistication of modern fraud. Visual inspection doesn’t detect pixel-level document forgery. Static database checks don’t identify synthetic identities built from stolen data fragments. And checks performed once at onboarding miss the evolving risk signals that emerge over time.”
Smith says that while the Financial Ombudsman Service is right to urge consumers to pause and verify before transferring money, businesses must also take responsibility.
“Businesses have a responsibility, and a regulatory obligation, to ensure that the accounts facilitating these scams don’t exist in the first place.
“The PSR’s reimbursement rules introduced in October 2024 place more responsibility on financial providers to protect customers from APP scams. That’s appropriate. But reimbursement is reactive, it happens after the harm is done.”
PREVENTION IS THE SOLUTION
She adds: “The real solution is prevention: ensuring that criminals can’t open the accounts, register the platforms, or establish the credibility they need to defraud victims in the first place.
“As Patrick Hurley, Ombudsman Director, said: ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is a scam.’ But businesses shouldn’t rely on consumers being sceptical. They should build systems that make it impossible for ‘too good to be true’ offers to establish legitimacy in the first place.
“That’s not checkbox compliance. It’s defence.”
