How Many Deepfakes Are Being Created? 2026 Prevalence Data

Deepfake volume is one of the hardest numbers in digital safety to pin down precisely — there is no central registry of synthetic media — but a growing set of platform incident logs, fraud-detection vendors, and child-safety hotlines now publish enough verified counts to sketch the real trajectory. Here is what the most recent data actually shows.

1. The baseline: how many deepfakes exist, and how fast that count is moving

Estimates of total deepfake volume vary by methodology, but every recent dataset points the same direction — sharply up, and accelerating faster than earlier projections assumed.

Home Security Heroes' census also found that 99% of individuals targeted in deepfake pornography are women, and that a convincing 60-second deepfake pornographic video can be produced from a single clear face photo in under 25 minutes at no monetary cost.^[2]

2. Fraud and identity-verification attacks are the fastest-growing category

Financial fraud and identity-verification bypass account for the sharpest year-over-year growth rates in the current data, outpacing even the raw volume growth in section one.

Fraud- and identity-focused vendors converge on the same read: deepfake fraud attempts grew from Sumsub's^[6] 11% share^[5] of all global fraud to Signicat's^[12] 42.5%^[13] of financial-sector fraud attempts being AI-driven overall — even as only 22%^[14] of financial institutions report having AI-specific defenses in place.

3. CSAM and "nudify" apps: where deepfake volume turns criminal

Deepfake growth is not evenly distributed across use cases — child sexual abuse material and non-consensual "nudify" tools show some of the steepest year-over-year increases in the entire dataset.

The trajectory from Sensity's 2019 baseline — a roughly 15,000-deepfake estimated total, 96% non-consensual pornography^[24] — to Indicator's 40-million-plus monthly nudify-site visitor count in early 2026^[19] illustrates how far both the volume and the accessibility of this category have moved in six years.

4. Regional enforcement data: South Korea's deepfake sex-crime surge

South Korea has produced some of the most granular law-enforcement data on deepfake sex crimes anywhere, largely because of a 2024 national scandal that triggered a formal police response.

5. Public exposure and awareness: how many people are actually seeing deepfakes

Beyond incident counts, survey data captures how much of the general public has personally encountered deepfake content — and how confident they feel spotting it.

Key numbers at a glance

Sources