European Card Fraud - Portugal

A Dangerous Rising Trend

Portugal’s losses are on a dangerous upward trajectory; overall card fraud losses for 2025 sit at an all-time high at €20.6M. Since 2019 losses have been consistently on the up, with an average increase of 27% per year. 

This is almost entirely driven by Card-not-Present fraud, so much so that that the two lines are inseparable on the graph. There is almost no loss value for the other fraud types, which begs the question of whether these types are truly quashed or whether reporting is leaning towards categorising all losses as card-not-present, or in the case of multiple types, choosing card-not-present as the reporting type. Portugal’s basis points are steady, however, at 1.65, suggesting that fraud losses are in hand with consumer spending. 

Strong Customer Authentication is cited as a key defence against card fraud in Portugal, as across the rest of Europe. The Banco de Portugal also recently introduced a Verification of Payee system, allowing consumers to verify the bank details for a payee to whom they intend to make a payment. This is an excellent tool that has had success in other European countries. However, shoring up transfer risk by introducing this step has the inevitable outcome that fraudsters will try to gain money through other MOs and channels. Social engineering on cards is just one of the areas that has become, in recent years, an appealing tactic.