Americans can’t spot a deepfake, and that’s a business crisis, not just a consumer problem

Presented by Veriff Americans can’t reliably distinguish real from AI-generated content, and that’s not just a media literacy problem; it’s a direct threat to how businesses verify identity online.New research finds that while many people are aware of deepfakes, their ability to distinguish them from reality is barely better than a coin flip. A 2026 survey conducted by Veriff and Kantar among 3,000 respondents in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil shows Americans scoring just 0.07 on a scale where 0 represents random guessing.If people can’t distinguish authentic visual content, they can’t reliably distinguish authentic identities. In practice, that means the same users interacting with digital services are often unable to tell whether the person on the other side of a screen is real.That ineffectiveness has direct consequences for every digital business that relies on image- and video-based identity verification to confirm who is on the other side of a screen. That includes everything from customer bank onboarding and account recovery to marketplace seller verification, high-value ecommerce transactions, social platform authentication, and enterprise access control. In the U.S., those consequences are already material — synthetic identity fraud now accounts for billions in annual losses, and the tools to generate convincing fakes are now widely accessible.The report also identifies a small but high-risk cohort: the roughly 7% of users who perform poorly at detecting deepfakes, yet remain confident in their ability and rarely verify what they see. While this is small as a percentage, at scale it represents millions of accounts that are highly exploitable targets for fraud.If users can’t reliably distinguish real from synthetic identities, then any system that depends on visual verification is fundamentally exposed. Identity verification can no longer be treated as a compliance function; instead, it has to be built as core digital infrastructure.“Now t