2024’s Most Surprising Fraud Trends — and What They Mean for 2025
This past year was a big one for the fraud industry. GenAI brought seismic shifts for both fraud teams and fraud professionals, including the emergence of next-generation fraud bots and more sophisticated scam tactics. It’s been a driving force behind fraudsters’ success and a 14% year-over-year increase in fraud losses.
2024’s attack trends aren’t an anomaly. Fraudsters’ evolution and increased activity foreshadow new peaks in attack intensity and sophistication. The rise of large-scale, GenAI-powered fraud attacks in 2024 is a warning sign of what’s to come in 2025.
2024’s Surprising Numbers
During the early parts of 2024, there was an uptick in fraud attack intensity: in January, February and March, months that usually bring sweeping brute-force fraud blitzes, attacks became less widespread but more targeted. These hyper-targeted attacks were longer and more sophisticated, almost doubling the impact of each individual attack.
In summer, we really saw attacks take off — and got our first glimpse of how GenAI can power massive attacks. This past June, which is typically one of the calmest attack months of the year, brought a 300% increase in risky user IDs associated with attacks compared to June 2023. The surge in summer fraud was driven by the fast adoption of next-generation bots, which enable scalable attacks capable of bypassing traditional fraud defenses. Between January and June, bot-led attacks doubled, with our research revealing that nearly half of attacks were almost exclusively comprised of next-generation bots.
The Takeaway: GenAI has given fraudsters the tools to efficiently create bespoke, highly effective attacks. Armed with these new tools, fraudsters are becoming more selective with their targets, and more aggressive with their attacks. They’re bombarding their victims with larger, longer attacks, adapting their strategies to defeat any defenses that may get in their way.
Fraudsters’ New Year’s Goals: APP Scams, Identity Fraud & More
2024’s trends have paved the way for what could be a massive wave of sophisticated fraud attacks in 2025. Over the past year, fraudsters have been building a war chest of identity data — in 2024, more than 1 billion people had their identity data compromised, a 4x increase from 2023. Fraudsters aren’t going to waste any time putting that data to use in 2025: with exposed data enabling identity theft and fueling AI-generated synthetic identities, the coming year will bring a flurry of fraudulent account openings and account takeovers through bot-powered attacks.
As bots automate some forms of identity theft and synthetic identity fraud, expect fraudsters to focus more of their energy on scams and APP fraud. In 2024, APP fraud became businesses’ second-most experienced type of fraud, trailing only identity theft. GenAI has, of course,enabled more sophisticated and convincing scams, which fraudsters will exploit to the fullest extent. Real-time money movement rails are especially vulnerable here, as they enable fast fraud that’s hard to catch. There’s a wave of consumer demand for real-time payments and management that is already a huge fraud vector: expect it to get worse in 2025.
Regardless of the attack type, fraudsters’ hyper-targeted approach will zero in on businesses with clear vulnerabilities in their fraud stacks. They’ll work hand-in-hand with their sophisticated bot armies to tailor attacks to beat individual targets’ controls, resulting in large-scale threats. If fraud teams don’t adapt quickly to these threats, 2025 will be a year of unprecedented prosperity for fraudsters — and constant headaches for fraud professionals.
Spoiling Fraudster’s 2025 Plans
Fraud teams can still take steps to prepare for what’s to come. Despite the advanced tools hypercharging fraud, it’s still (faster, stronger) fraud: you know how to stop fraud. And we can help make sure you’ve got the strategy in place to detect emerging methodologies and attack shifts.
For more on 2025’s biggest fraud threats and how to prepare for them, download The 2025 Fraud Defense Playbook.
