European Card Fraud - United Kingdom

UK Demonstrates Resilience in the Face of Relentless Social Engineering Tactics

The UK reported a minor increase in card fraud losses for 2025 at £594.9M, up slightly from £592.5M in 2024. Consumer spending is also up, but not quite enough proportionately to fraud losses, resulting in a small increase from 4.51 to 4.61 BPS. Overall losses have not reached the peak of £620.6M in 2019. 

Within these losses, Card-not-Present fraud is slowly increasing, from £412.5M in 2024 to £423.5M in 2025. The main concern for banks is consumers being tricked into divulging one-time passwords, which in turn allows fraudsters to connect the cards to their own devices and to e-wallets under their control. Once this ‘authentic’ token is created, the fraudster can spend large amounts unchecked. Some banks in the UK utilise the award winning Scam Signal solution, which is helping them unpick the subtle markers of social engineering to intervene on scams before money leaves an account.

ID fraud, on the other hand, is decreasing, dropping 12% from £61.5M in 2024 to £54M in 2025. Despite the unprecedented acceleration in AI technology, which is allowing fraudsters to create increasingly convincing synthetic identities, the UK is making good strides to identify and prevent these attempts. 

Card Lost or Stolen has decreased slightly from £111.7M to £109.8M. The 2026 UK Finance Report suggests that while losses have decreased in this category, cases have risen along with the number of cards in circulation. What is clear is that with the rise in physical cards in the UK, the threat of cards being taken by a fraudster (whether by theft or opportunity) is significant; the loss value is high, and the threat is always present. Furthermore, with recent changes to regulations around contactless limits, banks can now set their own limits. It’s possible that a stolen card could yield more money before being PIN locked, if banks shift those thresholds up from the current £100 limit. 

While the UK has its fraud losses under control for now, cases are still on the rise and the fraud-loss pot is still enormous. It’s imperative that banks take action to fight sophisticated tools with unified system for fraud decisioning that can cut through the noise and allow business to take action against risky activity, using cutting-edge AI tools & comprehensive customer profiling to detect patterns of fraud & scams.