Payment fraud is growing faster than ever. As digital payments expand globally, the tactics used by fraudsters are unimaginable. From chargeback scams to identity theft, these numbers say it all.
In 2023 alone, global payment card fraud losses reached $33.83 billion, according to the Nilson Report, and that figure has been edging up ever since.
Understanding payment fraud statistics in 2025 matters. These numbers don’t just highlight a trend; they tell the real story of how fraud is evolving, why it’s becoming harder to detect, and what businesses need to do to stay ahead.
In this article, we break down the most important trends, insights, and real data every business needs to know in 2025 and beyond.
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- Nearly 8 in 10 businesses (79%) were targeted by payment fraud.
- The global cost of digital payment fraud is expected to surpass $50 billion in 2025.
- Synthetic identity fraud is one of the fastest-rising threats, with estimated losses exceeding $35 billion
- Global payment-fraud attack rates remain high, averaging 3.3% of digital transactions, showing that fraud pressure is not easing despite stronger verification tools.
- Credit card fraud continues to lead all digital payment fraud types worldwide
- First-time payee fraud is surging, with more than two-thirds (67%) of fraudulent payments traced to newly added recipients
Global Payment Fraud Statistics 2025
1. 79% of organisations experienced attempted or successful payment fraud (Association for Financial Professionals (AFP))
Four out of every five companies faced payment fraud attempts in the last year, proving that no individual, industry, geography, or business size is immune. Firms with strong controls are still being targeted, which means fraudsters are outpacing traditional security measures.
2. Business Email Compromise (BEC) remains the top fraud vector (AFP / Truist Key Highlights Report 2025).
BEC is still the most successful way criminals trick organizations into sending money to the wrong accounts. Attackers manipulate employees, spoof executives, and alter invoice details, bypassing systems not through code, but through human psychology. Even with authentication tools in place, fraudsters are thriving on social engineering.
4. Only 22% of organizations recovered 75% or more of stolen funds (AFP / Truist 2025 Report).
Once money leaves the account, getting it back is becoming significantly harder. Fraud recovery rates dropped sharply from previous years, meaning companies must prioritize prevention over after-the-fact remediation. Instant payments and faster settlement rails leave very little room for reversal.
5. Cross-border payment fraud is affecting 88% of financial institutions (J.P. Morgan)
Cross-border payments carry higher regulatory, operational, and authentication complexity; fraudsters are exploiting those gaps. As global commerce grows, so does the fraud surface: more currencies, more intermediaries, and more points of failure.
6. Verification fraud is rising: 1 in 20 digital identity checks is fraudulent (Veriff, Top Fraud Trends in Digital Banking 2025).
Payment fraud is not only happening at the transaction level it’s happening at the onboarding level. Synthetic IDs, AI-generated documents, and deepfake biometrics are enabling criminals to open or access accounts that look legitimate on the surface. This increases long-term fraud risk across the entire customer lifecycle.
7. The value of global payment fraud continues to grow, with e-commerce and real-time payment channels leading the surge (Sift 2025 Fraud Analysis).
Real-time payments increase speed and convenience. Fraudsters know that once a transaction is instant, recovery is near impossible. Meanwhile, e-commerce environments continue to attract card-not-present attacks due to rising online activity.
Online Payment & E-Commerce Fraud Statistics (2025-2029)
1. Global e-commerce fraud losses are projected to reach $107 billion by 2029 (Sift, Tracking the Evolution of Payment Fraud (2025).
Online fraud is scaling at an explosive rate. Losses are expected to more than double from 2024’s $44.3 billion. This acceleration is driven by the shift toward online shopping, digital wallets, mobile apps, and instant payment methods all of which create new entry points for attackers.
2. Online payment fraud attack rates remain high at 3.3% globally (Sift)
On average, 3.3 out of every 100 online transactions are fraudulent or attempted fraud. This is an extremely high attack rate for a global dataset, signalling persistent pressure on merchants across industries from retail to gaming to fintech.
3. Identity fraud is surging 1 in every 20 verification attempts is fraudulent (Veriff)
Synthetic identities, deepfake selfies, doctored passports, and AI-generated documents are being used to create accounts that appear legitimate and then exploited for fraud. This compromises payment platforms long before an actual transaction happens.
4. Card-Not-Present (CNP) fraud remains the largest category of online payment fraud worldwide
Source: Visa & Merchant Risk Council
CNP fraud is where the cardholder’s physical card is not present. This thrives in digital environments. Fraudsters use stolen card numbers, phishing, account takeovers, and bot-driven testing attacks to make online purchases. As e-commerce grows, CNP fraud continues to lead all digital fraud types.
5. E-commerce platforms see major fraud spikes during global sales events (Ravelin, Online Retail Fraud Trends 2025).
Fraudsters love peak shopping periods like Black Friday, holiday seasons, and major sales events. Merchants reported sharp year-over-year increases in attack volumes during these periods. Higher traffic means more chances to slip fraudulent transactions through weak points.
6. More than 66% of online retailers globally report an increase in fraud attempts year-over-year (Ravelin, 2025 Fraud Trends for Online Retailers).
This aligns with global online shopping growth but also with the increasing sophistication of fraud networks using automation, bots, and coordinated attacks across multiple platforms.
7. Dark-web exposure continues to fuel online fraud. 269 million card records leaked in 2024 (Recorded Future)
The sheer volume of stolen card data circulating on the dark web shows how massive the threat is. These card records fuel CNP fraud, phishing, account takeovers, chargebacks, and large merchant-targeted attacks.
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AI-Driven Payment Fraud (2025): How Artificial Intelligence Is Powering the Next Wave of Financial Crime
1. AI-enabled fraud attempts have grown by 1,265% in one year (TransUnion).
Fraudsters are adopting AI tools faster than businesses. From voice-cloning to bot-driven card testing, AI has multiplied the scale and speed of modern fraud.
2. Over 50% of digital fraud now involves some form of AI automation (Deloitte).
Automation is the new attack vector. Fraudsters use AI scripts and bots to test stolen cards, guess passwords, create phishing content, and attack checkout pages on a large scale.
3. Deepfake-based identity fraud has risen by more than 3,000% (Onfido)
AI-generated faces, videos, and ID documents are passing verification checks. This trend is fueling account takeover, synthetic identity creation, and onboarding-related fraud.
4. One in three fraud teams now encounters AI-generated synthetic identities (Experian)
AI now builds fake people complete with believable photos, biometrics, social profiles, and documents, making identity fraud harder to detect than ever.
5. 77% of financial institutions say AI has made fraud attacks more sophisticated (PYMNTS x Featurespace)
It’s getting smarter, with attacks engineered to mimic genuine customer behavior and bypass traditional controls.
6. 46% of global businesses have been targeted by AI-generated scams (Kaspersky).
Deepfake voices of CEOs, cloned emails, and AI-crafted phishing messages have now become everyday threats.
7. AI-driven fraud is expected to add $40 billion to global losses by 2027 (Gartner).
According to a report, within the next three years, AI-enabled attacks will be one of the biggest cost drivers in global payment fraud.
Top Fraud Trends to Watch in 2026
Third-Party & Supply Chain Fraud Risks in 2026
In 2026, one of the fastest-growing fraud risks will come from third-party vendors and supply-chain partners. Threat actors are increasingly bypassing strong corporate security by infiltrating smaller, less protected service providers.
As global supply chains become more digital and interconnected, third-party payment fraud and supply-chain cybercrime will emerge as major financial crime trends to watch. Companies that lack strong vendor-risk monitoring will be at the highest risk.
Crypto Fraud & Next-Generation Ransomware in 2026
Cryptocurrency will continue to fuel more advanced ransomware attacks in 2026 and beyond. The pseudonymity of blockchain transactions allows cybercriminals to hide funds more effectively using mixers, privacy coins, AI-generated wallets, and cross-chain laundering tools.
Crypto-enabled payment fraud will be harder to trace, and ransomware in 2026 is expected to become more automated, AI-driven, and globally coordinated.
Internal Control Weaknesses Becoming Major Fraud Catalysts
One of the most overlooked fraud risks of 2026 remains inside the organization. Weak internal controls such as poor segregation of duties, excessive access rights, outdated approval frameworks, and manual record-keeping create conditions where internal fraud can flourish.
With the shift toward hybrid work and digital workflows, internal fraud in 2026 will grow more sophisticated unless companies strengthen governance, monitoring, and audit controls.
Operational Inefficiencies Enabling Fraud in 2026
In the future, fraud will increasingly exploit operational gaps rather than technology flaws. Companies relying on manual approvals, spreadsheet-heavy processes, siloed systems, or delayed reconciliations will face higher exposure to financial crime.
As organizations adopt faster payment rails, the lack of real-time oversight becomes an even greater weakness
Rising Cases of Internal Asset Misappropriation
Employees may exploit process gaps to divert funds, approve fake vendor invoices, inflate expense claims, or misuse company assets.
Detecting these schemes will require more advanced analytics capable of identifying unusual payment trends and suspicious vendor relationships. Companies with strong whistleblowing systems and continuous monitoring tools will be far better equipped to prevent asset misappropriation fraud.
AI-Driven Fraud Becomes More Realistic and Harder to Detect
In the future, artificial intelligence will become a double-edged sword. This new era of AI-driven payment fraud will blur the line between genuine customer activity and criminal behavior, making traditional rules-based systems far less effective.
Fraudsters will lean heavily on machine learning models to generate legitimate-looking transactions, messages, and behavioral patterns, pushing global fraud risk to unprecedented levels.
Payment Fraud Prevention
1. Use Advanced AI Systems to Detect Fraud Early
Modern fraud prevention relies heavily on intelligent, data-driven tools. A robust AI fraud detection system can analyze vast amounts of transaction data in real time, identify unusual behavior, and flag suspicious activity long before traditional controls would notice anything.
By integrating identity verification, AI becomes the first line of defense against increasingly complex fraud schemes in 2026 and beyond.
2. Adopt Advanced Document Verification Technology
As fraudsters become more sophisticated, verifying the authenticity of documents is no longer optional rather it’s essential. Modern document verification solutions use AI, OCR technology, and database-matching to confirm whether passports, driver’s licenses, national IDs, and corporate documents are legitimate.
When businesses embed document verification into their onboarding and payment flows, they significantly reduce the risk of synthetic identity fraud, account abuse, and unauthorized transactions.
3. Strengthen Security With Biometric Verification
Biometric verification, such as facial recognition, fingerprint scanning, adds a powerful layer of protection to payment systems. Because biometric identifiers are unique and difficult to replicate, they provide far more security than passwords, OTPs, or PINs.
By requiring biometric verification at critical steps, such as high-value transactions or account changes, businesses can authenticate users more confidently and drastically reduce account takeover attempts.
4. Use an Address Verification System (AVS) for Safer Payments
An effective Address Verification System helps confirm that the billing address provided during checkout matches the address registered with the issuing bank.
This is especially vital for e-commerce transactions where the cardholder is not physically present.
AVS checks ZIP codes, street numbers, and full billing details, helping businesses detect mismatched information and block fraudulent card-not-present (CNP) purchases.
5. Implement Continuous Transaction Monitoring
Fraud doesn’t always happen in one big event sometimes it starts small and grows quickly. That’s why real-time transaction monitoring is critical.
Businesses should use automated systems to track unusual patterns, such as:
sudden high-value purchases
rapid-fire micro-transactions
payments from unfamiliar devices
repeated failed attempts
unusual timing or location patterns
6. Strengthening Fraud Prevention Through Multi-Layered Defenses
By combining AI-driven analytics, document checks, biometric verification, address validation, and continuous monitoring, businesses build a powerful, multi-layered security framework.
futhermore , this also helps maintain customer trust and protect financial operations.
Every layer reinforces the next, making it increasingly difficult for cybercriminals to exploit weaknesses in the payment process.
How individuals should protect themselves from payment fraud
Create Strong, Secure Passwords
One of the simplest ways to protect yourself from payment fraud is to strengthen your passwords. A secure password acts as your first line of defense against unauthorized access to your accounts.
It’s also important to rotate passwords regularly and avoid using the same password across multiple accounts. If one account is compromised, shared credentials can expose everything else you own.
Limit Access to Sensitive Information
Protecting your personal and financial information is essential in today’s digital world. Only share confidential details when absolutely necessary and only with trusted parties. Be mindful of where you store documents, login credentials, and identification numbers, whether online or in physical spaces. Good privacy habits greatly reduce your exposure to social engineering and identity theft.
Stay Alert to Fraud Red Flags
Fraud prevention starts with awareness. Many scams rely on urgency, fear, or unrealistic promises to trick victims. Be cautious of unsolicited requests for money or personal information, especially from unfamiliar contacts.
If something feels off, pause and verify. Report suspicious messages or links to authorities or your bank before responding.
Protect Your Devices From Malware
Your devices are gateways to your financial accounts, so keeping them secure is critical. Install reputable antivirus and anti-malware software to defend against malicious programs that can steal data or track your activity.
Conclusion
Payment fraud is no longer a background risk; it has become one of the most persistent and fast-evolving threats facing businesses today. Recent data shows that 79% of organizations encountered attempted or successful payment fraud in the past year, proving that no industry or market is exempt.
The good news is that modern tools give businesses the ability to stay ahead. Companies that invest in data-driven fraud prevention, real-time monitoring, biometric and document verification, AI-powered detection, and strong internal controls drastically reduce their exposure. Fraud prevention is shifting from a reactive function to a strategic, intelligence-led discipline, one that protects revenue, customer trust, and long-term financial stability.
Technology is advancing on both sides of the equation; the question is whether your fraud strategy is evolving fast enough to match the threat.
