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Suspected attempts to beat the controls that U.S. financial institutions use to validate, verify and authenticate the identities of their clients accounted for more than 40 percent of the 3.8 million total suspicious activity reports, or SARs, they filed in 2021, federal officials disclosed Tuesday.

In a 19-page “Financial Trend Analysis,” the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, noted that financial institutions identified fraud as the most common of 14 possible motives for identity-related exploits during those 12 months, with identity theft and third-party money laundering ranking second and third respectively.

Banks and other depository institutions, which filed the largest share of identity-related SARs, flagged attempts to impersonate customers as the most frequent identity-related exploit, according to FinCEN, while money services businesses most often flagged possible suspected attempts to circumvent verification.

Fraudsters and other criminals frequently use forged or false personal records to defeat validation, sometimes combining real and fake personal information to fabricate an identity.

Third-party money launderers commonly use straw men to avoid detection during verification, while account-takeover suspects use credentials stolen from customers to defeat the authentication process and drain their accounts.

FinCEN estimated Tuesday that the transactions associated with identity-related SARs amounted to more than $212 billion in 2021.