European Card Fraud - Austria

Fraud Losses Continue to Climb to Dangerous Levels

Card fraud losses are rising fast in Austria, hitting an all-time high of €8.7M. While fraud is rising, basis points remain very strong at 0.6 basis points, meaning the proportion of fraud to overall transactions is well under control. What Austrian issuers need to focus on is managing the rising fraud losses by strengthening real-time decisioning, utilizing AI to help uncover fraud patterns, and ensuring the full scope of the customer journey is being analysed for intelligent fraud decisioning.

E-wallet fraud continues to cause problems across Europe, and Austria is no exception. This popular social engineering modus operandi sees consumers bypassing all Strong Customer Authentication controls because they have been tricked into doing so; the fraudster doesn’t need to go to the effort of bypassing controls or taking over the account, because the consumer opens those doors for them. Austria’s Card-not-present losses remain the dominant fraud type (39%) and are consistently on the rise, driven in all likelihood by social engineering, which targets authentication gateways such as wallet tokenisation. 

A noticeable proportion of Austria’s fraud losses have been attributed to ID Fraud, with 31% of all fraud losses belonging to this category. This may be driven in part by the renewal of Austrian digital ID certificates, which were rolled out in 2026. In anticipation of this renewal, fraudsters have been exploiting a genuine event by sending scam messages about ID renewal. Across Europe, synthetic identity fraud is a major problem, with sophisticated solutions being increasingly available for fraudsters to create believable false IDs with minimal effort.