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Forecasters have long predicted that the U.S. payments market’s move to EMV chip cards for in-person transactions will drive criminals into e-commerce fraud. Now data is emerging to show the nuances these fraudsters are exploiting, and how the rise in online fraud is hardly limited to the U.S. market.
In particular, criminals are increasingly taking advantage of information available to them through seemingly unstoppable data breaches to impersonate consumers online. And they’re increasingly taking advantage of the less-secure mobile channel to commit their frauds. Indeed, chiefly because of these trends worldwide online fraud will reach $25.6 billion by 2020, up from $10.7 billion last year, according to a report released Monday by Juniper Research, a U.K.-based research firm.
A recent report from Boston-based researcher Aite Group forecasted online fraud in the U.S. alone would grow from $2.8 billion in 2014 to $7.2 billion in 2020.
Mobile has already climbed remarkably as a significant generator of e-commerce transactions. Citing research by the RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center, a Juniper white paper summarizing its report says about 42% of all U.S. e-commerce transactions last year started on a mobile device.
“According to the research, fraudsters now perceive mobile-payment channels to be particularly vulnerable (and therefore attractive targets) as many organisations have yet to apply the same levels of protection to mobile as they have to desktop transactions,” Juniper says in a statement about its research.
In turn, that ballooning fraud will push spending on fraud-detection solutions by financial institutions and online merchants to $9.2 billion annually by 2020, a 30% increase from the current rate, Juniper says.
Besides exploiting the mobile channel, e-commerce fraudsters are also taking advantage of the popularity of gift cards and stores’ increasingly available “buy-online-pick-up-in-store” programs to commit their thefts, according to Juniper. Comparing the holiday-shopping seasons in 2015 and 2014, the volume of “[b]uy online/pick-up in-store, which has a higher fraud-attempt rate than other modes of delivery, increased 47% compared to 2014,” says the white paper, citing research by processor ACI Worldwide.
