As many of you will have gathered, the next new book is all about Digital Trust in a Deep Fake World, coming out summer 2026 (I’m working on it now), so I was interested to see two fraud reports from by veriff, the AI-driven identity verification company, this morning.
Released today, the reports show fraud is rising – surprise, surprise – but affecting almost one in twenty (5%) transactions. That seems really high as, if my memory serves, it would mean fraud has doubled over the past twenty years. Well, in fact it’s worse than that. According to The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) annual fraud report, fraud has exploded in the last two decades.
On the other side of the coin, financial institutions and regulators are doing all they can to defend the consumer from such fraudulent activities, as illustrated by this chart from Stripe.
The massive increase in 3D Secure (3DS) two-step authentication in Europe is down to the introduction of the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2).
The two charts together show that the criminal fraternity are doing a great job online and on mobile in stealing our money, whilst governments and financial institutions are finding it harder and harder to keep up. That’s why I found two reports from veriff of interest. You can download them here: Identity Fraud Report 2025 and Fraud Industry Pulse Report 2025. The main findings are:
The fraud challenge is increasing
Unfortunately, what we call the net fraud fate – that is, the sum of all types of fraud combined – remains high. According to our data, 5% of all verification attempts were fraudulent in 2024. This number confirms what we discovered in our consumer research carried out as part of our Fraud Index throughout 2024, where almost half of our respondents (47.55%) said that they had experienced some kind of fraudulent online activity over the past 12 months.
Fraud follows the money
Financial services, where there are the richest of pickings for fraudsters, remains one of the industries most likely to be targeted by fraudulent attacks. Authorized fraud – where a user is tricked into performing an identity verification session – is orders of magnitude more prevalent for banks, crypto platforms, payments providers, and other fintech platforms, coming in at more than double the global average.
Fraudsters target ecommerce platforms
There was only one industry with more authorized fraud than financial services: ecommerce. This was the number one industry to suffer at the hands of authorized fraud scams – and by a considerable margin: more than 18 times the global average. The rewards for fraudsters are arguably as great in ecommerce as they are in financial services, with millions of dollars changing hands between merchants and customers every day, and many ecommerce platforms still operating with much lighter fraud defenses.
Account takeover and multi-accounting are on the rise
Account takeover, where cybercriminals take ownership of online accounts using stolen passwords and usernames, and multi-accounting, the practice of opening multiple accounts to take advantage of promotions or playing bonuses, both saw a huge surge in 2024. Account takeover cases increased by 13% compared to 2023 and multi-accounting saw a 10% year-on-year increase.
Impersonation attacks still dominate
Impersonation fraud amounted to more than 82% of all the fraudulent attempts we saw this year. 16% of all fraud cases in 2023 involved people presenting altered, counterfeit, and fabricated documents, which was similar to last year. However, there was also a startling rise of adversary-in-the-middle attacks, a type of cyberattack where cybercriminals intercept, relay or alter the communication between two parties without their knowledge, while giving the impression of a direct communication. These types of attacks went up 46% compared to 2023.
