Halloween is tomorrow, and do you know what that means? For starters, it means you can dance under the rare blue moon. A full moon visible for all time zones on Earth hasn’t happened since 1944, and won’t happen again until 2039. It also means you can don a costume and be anything you like. Kind of like a fraudster, that assumes a new persona every time there is a payment fraud attack.

Payment fraud is exploding. So are false positives, customer friction and investigation costs. Unfortunately, as customers continue to pull us down the river of rapid digital transformation, traditional fraud detection systems are being left in the sand.

As efforts increase to protect customers from card-present and card-not-present fraud, there is an increasing risk lurking for banks and retailers: false positives. According to KPMG’s 2019 global fraud survey, 51% of respondents reported a significant number of false positives resulting from current technology solutions and decreasing efficiencies in fraud detection.

With an estimated 37.9% of all internet traffic attributed to bots, and bad bots accounting for more than 50% of that, retailers and financial organizations are struggling to defend against a constant barrage of account takeovers, credential stuffing, card cracking attacks and fake account creation.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has enabled contactless payment volumes to increase quicker than previously projected. According to Juniper research, contactless payments will triple to $6 trillion worldwide by 2024, up from about $2 trillion in 2020, as the amount of mobile wallet transactions increase and banks expand the use of contactless cards.

While major, multi-million dollar man-in-the-middle attacks have remained under the radar in recent months, spear phishing and social engineering attacks are on the rise as fraudsters continue to take advantage of the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19.

When it comes to card-not-present transactions, security is constantly a moving target. Between February and April, the peak period when COVID-19 was spreading across much of the US, cyber-attacks against the financial sector were reported to have risen by 238%. The exponential growth of digital payment transactions, combined with the increasing variety of customer-facing devices and payment applications, has many financial institutions re-evaluating their approaches to cybersecurity.