Digital fraud remains on the rise, according to a 2023 State of Omnichannel Fraud Report. According to insights, the pivot to increasingly digital transactions since the beginning of the pandemic means the overall risk to individuals and organizations is even greater than it was pre-pandemic.
The study showed that 4.6% of all customers’ digital transactions globally were suspected to be fraudulent. This percentage is in line with the rates found in 2019. However, despite the similarities to the percentage prior to the pandemic, because the number of transactions conducted digitally has markedly risen in the last few years, the total volume of suspected digital fraud attempts has increased dramatically. Globally, such attempts have increased by 80% from 2019 to 2022, while rising 122% for digital transactions originating in the U.S. during that time.
Globally, the gaming and retail industries saw the highest rate of suspected digital fraud at 7.5% and 7.2%, respectively. These were followed by video gaming at 5.4%, financial services at 4.2% and communities (i.e., online dating and forums) at 4%.
However, the highest rate of growth globally since 2019 was observed in the travel & leisure industry. This group saw a 117% increase in suspected digital fraud globally as more and more consumers looked to resume traveling following the pandemic period. For transactions originating from the U.S., the travel and leisure industry also saw a significant rise in suspected digital fraud, where it increased by 42% since 2019. The logistics and financial services industries also experienced significant growth in digital fraud attempts, up 67% and 44% over the time period, respectively.
The study also found that a large percentage of people are being impacted by fraud attempts, and across a wide range of communications vehicles. In a consumer survey across 18 countries and regions globally, 52% of respondents indicated that they were targeted by fraud via email, online, phone call or text messaging in the three months beginning September 2022. With U.S. respondents, 49% said they had been targeted by fraud attempts via those communications channels over the same time period.
The study also explored other types and channels of fraud. For instance, while the vast majority (85%) of calls received by its U.S. financial services call center customers were from mobile phones in 2022, just 14% of all high-risk calls were made from them last year. Conversely, for the 3% of U.S. financial services call center calls that were made from non-fixed Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) — a phone number that isn’t associated with a physical address — 62% of all high-risk calls into the call center came from them last year making it the riskiest channel for the call center.
The study also examined the volume and severity of data breaches over the course of 2022 and compared them to previous years using publicly available data. Results showed that the number of data breaches in the U.S. increased by 83% from 2020 to 2022. These breaches have played a key role in helping to fuel an explosion in identity engineering, with synthetic identities becoming a record-setting problem in 2022.
