Digital fraud rose significantly in 2022 compared to 2021, with the global attack rate up 20% year over year (YOY) – continuing the early signs seen in 2021 as some economies re-opened. While parts of Europe were back in lockdown for a brief period at the start of the year, most of the world was starting to look forward, beyond the pandemic, even if many Asian countries didn’t re-open their borders to international travel until the middle of 2022.

Cyber criminals had already been looking forward to expanding opportunities. Countries historically less impacted by fraud – Singapore, for example – were being clearly targeted at the start of the year with a surge in fraud attacks. By the end of the year, not only was much of the world back open for business, but there was talk of a new global fraud pandemic. Scams of all kinds – both traditional account takeover through phishing attacks as well as sophisticated authorised push payment fraud – were frequently in the news. Reports of industrial-scale scam centres and gangs in Asia and Eastern Europe(1) confirm that scams have become the latest organised digital crime, operating professionally and cross-border.

As fraud levels and sophistication increase, it becomes more important than ever to classify fraud into different types. Legacy fraud prevention approaches relying primarily on multi-factor authentication are insufficient, as are basic, single-model fraud detection solutions or black box approaches. Multiple, machine learning optimised detection models are required, running in real-time and targeting different methods of attack.

More than ever, understanding the customer journey and behaviour can help identify potential attacks in their early stages and prompt a response – for example, a real-time, in-app message to the end-user/customer confirming that they are about to make an unusual payment and to verify they are not being coerced into doing this can help bring about a last-minute sanity check and end an otherwise successful attack. Being able to tie together a 360-degree view of your customers across digital channels is also imperative to ensure fraudsters don’t exploit weaknesses with a multi-channel attack.

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