Every time your customers make an online payment, they trust that their sensitive data won’t end up in the wrong hands. But what if it did? With cybercriminals using AI and launching direct attacks on payment systems, securing financial transactions has become a high-stakes challenge for businesses worldwide. In the first half of 2023, around 48.77 billion card payments were made with EU/EEA-issued cards, of which an average of 7.31 million were fraudulent.

With the exponential expansion of AI, bad actors are frothing at the mouth. Advanced technology for automating social engineering techniques that previously required technical know-how is now within arm’s reach of anyone with a keyboard. Attempts to exploit and deceive are more common than ever, and they are emptying business’s pockets. In 2023, 800 businesses worldwide reported fraud losses totaling 6.5% of their revenue, amounting to $359 billion.

Customer fraud losses and remediation are often integrated as an inevitable cost of doing business Fraud’s impact on the bottom line is often considered when pricing products and services. This has happened since the first thief swiped a product from a marketplace stand. Today, scams responsible for severe business impact have become increasingly sophisticated, and the creeping costs are increasingly hard to budget for.

Forget ‘billions’, fraud is now a trillion-dollar challenge according to McKinsey, with phishing, account takeovers (ATOs), and credential-based attacks driving unprecedented losses. Needless to say, this step change underlines the urgency for scam-prone enterprises to add further protective layers as part of a fraud prevention strategy that combines emerging technologies.

Bonus offers, free trials, gifts, and other promotions are great ways for companies to encourage customer loyalty. But what happens when fraudsters and other malicious actors exploit the system to reap unfair rewards? Welcome to the world of bonus abuse. Bonus abuse costs an average of 15% of the iGaming sector’s annual revenues. This unethical behavior takes advantage of incentives designed to attract new customers or reward long-standing ones.

What if there were a way to negate the effectiveness of multi-factor authentication (or even bypass secure login protocols) without ever cracking a password? Session hijacking offers attackers a tempting shortcut to user accounts, bypassing the usual security barriers. In 2022 alone, researchers scouring the shadier corners of the internet (like the dark web) found 22 billion device and session cookie records – each of which could help to enable session hijacking.