European Card Fraud - Total Fraud Levels

Card Fraud Losses Hit New High

The message is clear for 2025: card fraud is on the increase, with losses across Europe hitting an all-time high of €1692M. The volatility of the noughties has given way to consistent increases and an imperative on organisations not to shy away from fraud prevention. Key concerns across countries include the pervasive problem of social engineering, which sees account holders themselves carry out fraud. Many robust authentication methods as required in order to release funds that are being inadvertently sent to bad actors.  

Card-not-present fraud remains the dominant threat across card fraud types; banks are continually calling out social engineering as a major problem in both digital and card space; card authentication steps such as tokenization are being set up by tricked account holders, allowing fraudsters to then use seemingly legitimate tokenized devices to carry out significant payments. PSD3 is due to come into enforcement in 2028, which will be putting pressure on all European countries to get their card losses under control. There may also be a sense of optimism as new measures push banks to strengthen their Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) controls, particularly around wallet provisioning.   

What has emerged from recent fraud trends and regulatory guidance across Europe and the rest of the globe, is that banks need to strengthen their fraud prevention across the full customer journey, assessing all transactional and non-transactional events in order to proactively pick up on warning signals that fraud may be about to occur. Intelligent decisioning across the account lifecycle is critical to understanding how fraudsters target any link in the chain in order to exploit a bank account.