3 Straightforward Solutions for 2025’s Biggest Fraud Challenges
2024 brought major shifts in the fraud landscape: more sophisticated scams, redefined seasonal trends, and, of course, the continued emergence of GenAI. Fraudsters are still running full steam ahead into 2025 — evolving attacks have pushed U.S. identity theft and fraud losses beyond $40 billion, with even higher numbers expected this year.1
Attacks are growing more complex, but the solutions don’t have to be. Here are three of the biggest fraud challenges we expect will impact businesses in 2025, and the straightforward ways to solve them:
Challenge #1: Stopping New Account Fraud Without Inhibiting Growth
In the first half of 2024, identity theft became the #1 most experienced type of fraud reported by businesses.2 The surge in ID theft has created a seemingly endless well of compromised PII to fuel fraudulent account openings, and fraudsters won’t waste any time taking advantage of it in 2025. Sophisticated bot scripts allow fraudsters to open thousands of accounts with minimal manual effort. Often, fraudsters allow these accounts to lurk in the shadows until an attack opportunity arises, meaning that, without the right tools, you may not be able to spot one of these attacks until it’s too late.
The Solution: Optimized, Orchestrated Data Calls
Evolving new account fraud is a tricky balance: security is a necessity, but placing a series of strenuous fraud checks in front of your “good” customers can hurt growth. It’s left many fraud professionals feeling like the only way to respond to modern attacks is to rebuild their fraud stack from the ground up, incorporating new systems for every potential new fraud type (and adding to the data noise to sift through).
Most of the time, that’s not the case. Simply reevaluating the order and location of your current fraud checks can maximize your fraud stack’s effectiveness, streamline experiences for users, and reduce unnecessary data expenses. The best way to balance security and customer experience is to create a dynamic workflow, using upstream tools to evaluate risk and applying downstream friction only to users who prompt it — if a new tool or two can help achieve that, it’s worth the investment, but a complete fraud stack overhaul is often unnecessary.
Challenge #2: Surging APP Fraud
Entering 2025, real-time transactions are available to around 90% of demand deposit accounts in the U.S. Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud exploits the instant, irrevocable nature of real time payments and money movement, and fraudsters have wasted no time capitalizing on this vulnerability. APP fraud was behind only identity theft as the second most experienced fraud type in the first half of 2024.3
Despite the fraud risks for both businesses and consumers — a third of U.S. adults sent money to a scammer in 2024, up from 20% in 2023 — both parties are still pushing to expand RTMM access in 2025. As the avenues for carrying out APP fraud widen, fraudsters are using GenAI to craft more convincing scam messages and tactics, limiting the effectiveness of consumer education and amplifying the importance of real-time, business-side scam defenses.
The Solution: End-to-End, Full Lifecycle Fraud Mitigation
In many cases, the same principles you’re using to detect fraud at onboarding can remain useful throughout the customer journey. Take behavioral analytics, for example: it detects high-risk behavior during account opening, but the same data can also reveal when there’s abnormal activity on an existing account. If a user’s behavior suddenly looks different than what they’ve shown in the past, it’s likely a sign that the account being accessed by someone other than its owner (or if the user shows an unusual level of hesitancy, it could signal that they’re being coerced as part of a scam).
Challenge #3: Supercharged, GenAI-Powered Fraud Attacks
As 2024 progressed, a surprising trend emerged. Fraud attacks were becoming less widespread, but more targeted and aggressive. In January 2024, we only saw half the number of attacks that we did in January 2023. But the attacks were 50-100% larger than they were at that same point in 2023. The trend only continued: by July 2024, attacks tripled in size compared to 2023.
Lots of factors contributed to this, namely the increasing accessibility of AI-powered fraud tools, including next-generation fraud bots. These tools enable fraudsters to launch massive, targeted attacks with ease. Fraudsters are able to probe their targets’ defenses to identify step-up triggers and ways around them, then launch large-scale bot attacks to exploit the vulnerabilities they found. With these tools becoming more widespread and advanced, attacks will only grow more powerful in 2025.
The Solution: Vendor Expertise
Fraud solution vendors, especially those that have a proven track record in a certain industry, likely have the broader, industry-wide perspective that a single business doesn’t. Those vendors’ knowledge can help you get ahead of attack trends that are plaguing your peers or expose gaps that make you a vulnerable target for attacks.
Preparing for 2025’s Challenges
Fraudsters are determined to make the most of 2025. But with the right tools and approach, your fraud team can keep them at bay and stay focused on your business goals. For more on how to get ahead of this year’s biggest fraud threats, grab our 2025 Fraud Defense Playbook.
