The end of year holiday season may be a time of celebration, but for fraudsters, it’s open season. Cybercriminals take full advantage of the spike in online shopping, shipping confusion, and emotional urgency – turning the season of giving into the season of taking. While we wait for the final data for 2025, it’s estimated that around $442 billion was lost to scammers this year.
What impacts consumers, often impacts those they trust to look after their money. Both traditional financial institutions and crypto platforms face heightened risks of scams and authorized push payment (APP) fraud. APP fraud occurs when victims are tricked into willingly transferring funds to fraudsters. APP fraud is the scammer’s masterpiece. The payments look legitimate because they route through fully verified, clean-looking accounts and the victims take the action, making it very difficult to spot illegitimate transactions. Traditional tools (identity checks, behavioral biometrics, and anomaly detection) only analyze the sender risk. They completely miss the recipient risk. By the time a victim reports the fraud, the funds are already gone.
While individuals bear the immediate consequences of falling for these types of scams, banks, real-time payment (RTP) networks, and crypto exchanges also suffer from financial losses, reputational damage, and increased customer disputes. 67% believe their financial institutions should reimburse them for money lost in a scam even when they personally authorized the transaction.
Currently, APP scams are the top threat targeting financial institutions, with over $10 billion worth of crypto lost in 2024 due to reimbursements, operational costs, and more.
To help you get a clearer view on these types of scams this holiday season, we invite you on an interactive journey in your customers’ shoes to show how easy it is to fall for APP fraud, and what can be done about it.
The post Follow the Fraud: How to Protect Your Customers this Holiday Season appeared first on Chainalysis.
