Card-Not-Present fraud slowly increasing in the UK as social engineering tactics evolve

LONDON: The 2025 European Fraud Map from global analytics software leader FICO (NYSE: FICO) shows that the UK financial services sector is making good strides in preventing fraud, as card fraud losses rose by just 2% year-on-year. This is in stark contrast to many European countries, including Norway, Sweden, Poland, Hungary and Greece, where fraud losses have jumped by 15% or more year-on-year. Across the continent, card fraud losses have reached an all-time high of €1.69 billion.

More information: https://www.fico.com/en/europeanfraud

Reporting card fraud losses of £594.9 million in 2025, up slightly from £592.5 million in 2024, the UK remains below the peak of £620.6 million seen in 2019. Within these losses, Card-not-Present fraud increased slightly, from £412.5 million in 2024 to £423.5 million in 2025. The data for the map is provided by Euromonitor International, and for the UK by UK Finance.

“The biggest threat to the UK financial services ecosystem is the relentless use of social engineering tactics, requiring multiple strategies to thwart fraudsters across the full customer journey,” said Sarah Cassidy, senior fraud consultant at FICO in EMEA. “In particular, banks are seeing a concerning trend of consumers being tricked into divulging one-time passwords which allows fraudsters to connect the cards to their own devices and e-wallets. Once this ‘authentic’ token is created the fraudster can spend large amounts unchecked.”

Other highlights from the report for the UK:

• ID fraud losses in the UK fell 12% from £61.5 million in 2024 to £54 million in 2025, despite the unprecedented acceleration in AI technology, which is allowing fraudsters to create increasingly convincing synthetic identities
• Losses from Card Lost or Stolen also decreased, from £111.7 million to £109.8 million year-on-year
• According to UK Finance data, the number of fraud cases has risen along with the number of cards in circulation. The threat of cards being taken by a fraudster is significant, particularly as changes to regulation around contactless limits mean a stolen card could yield more money before being PIN locked.

“While social engineering is a key concern across Europe, the UK has demonstrated its resilience against such attacks and has also made good strides in tackling ID fraud,” Cassidy said. “However, while fraud losses are under control for now, cases are still on the rise, and it is imperative that banks act. They must strengthen their fraud prevention across the full customer journey to successfully fight sophisticated fraud. AI tools, comprehensive customer profiling and monitoring of all transactional and non-transactional events will allow banks to detect patterns, pick up on warning signs and stop fraud and scams before losses occur.”

Intelligent decisioning across the account lifecycle is critical to understand how fraudsters target any link in the chain in order to exploit a bank account. Some UK banks are already utilising the award-winning Scam Signal solution, which is helping them identify the subtle markers of social engineering to intervene on scams before money leaves an account. The first real-time application bringing together telephony, customer and payment data to tackle the issue of APP fraud, the tool detects potential scam activity and enables banks to intervene with the customer if necessary.

Complementing Scam Signal, FICO’s fraud solutions portfolio includes the AI-powered FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager, which protects more than 4 billion cards worldwide and its newest solution, FICO® Enterprise Fraud Solution, powered by FICO® Platform.

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 200 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 80 countries do everything from protecting 4 billion payment cards from fraud, to improving financial inclusion, to increasing supply chain resiliency. The FICO® Score, used by 90% of top US lenders, is the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the US and has been made available in over 40 other countries, improving risk management, credit access and transparency. Learn more at www.fico.com.

FICO and Falcon are registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Fonte: Business Wire