The data detailing the levels of fraud are found in Jumio’s new holiday fraud report (“2019 Holiday New Account Fraud Report“). While the report shows new account fraud increasing throughout 2019, surprisingly, attempted new account ID fraud was 19 percent less during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend (compared to the average 2019 fraud levels). This is a time when fraud attempts normally escalate.
While attempts at retail fraud were lower across the biggest shopping weekend, for 2019 as a whole new account fraud increased to 1.8 percent. This represents a 106.8 percent increase over 2014 levels. During the 2019 holiday period, new account fraud dipped to 1.5 percent. However, this was still more than 80 percent higher than 2014’s equivalent holiday period levels.
With geographical regions, the Asia-Pacific region experienced the highest rates of full-year fraud at 3.27 percent while the U.S. had the lowest rates of fraud at 0.88 prevent. This is a trend which has been consistent over the last six years. While the U.S. experienced lower holiday fraud rates in 2019, new account fraud was still 138 percent higher in 2019 compared to 2014 levels.
Another regional aspect of interest is that with fraud levels in several emerging markets, while varied, these were, on average, significantly higher compared with more developed markets.
In terms of the more vulnerable sectors of the retail economy, the analysis from the report shows that the cryptocurrency and online gaming/gambling industries experienced higher-than-average fraud levels while the sharing economy and travel and entertainment industries experienced minimal fraud levels (that is less than 0.6 percent).
According to Philipp Pointner, Jumio’s chief product officer, companies need to learn from 2019 in preparation for 2020 because the problem of fraud is not going away: “As cybercriminals perfect and fine-tune their impersonation efforts, it’s getting more difficult for modern enterprises to distinguish between high-risk from low-risk users — and this is only going to accelerate thanks to large-scale data breaches, the evolution of the dark web and the looming threat of identity theft.”
