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Total losses to online payment fraud will exceed $343 billion globally over the next five years, as fraudsters continue to innovate and take over accounts of online users, according to new research.
The estimated global losses between 2023 and 2027 equate to more than 350 percent of tech giant Apple's 2021 net income, Juniper Research said in its report released this week.
The amount includes losses across digital transactions that include the sale of digital and physical goods, transfer of funds, as well as air ticket purchases.
"Online payment fraud losses are partly being driven by fraudster innovation in areas such as account takeover fraud, where a user's account is hijacked," Juniper said.
"This is despite the wide employment of identity verification measures."
Juniper's report noted that transactions involving physical merchandise or goods will be the largest single source of online fraud, accounting for nearly half (49 percent) of cumulative online payment fraud losses globally over the next five years.
Fraud is highly likely to occur in developing markets, especially where "address verification processes" are lax.
"Fraudsters [are] targeting physical goods specifically due to their resell potential," Juniper said, suggesting that merchants should adopt
strong anti-fraud measures, including multiple sources of address verification and multi-factor authentication to reduce risks.
"Payment fraud detection and prevention vendors must build a multitude of verification capabilities, and intelligently orchestrate different solutions depending on circumstances, in order to correctly protect both merchants and users," said Nick Maynard, author of the report.
(Reporting by Cleofe Maceda; editing by Daniel Luiz )
