As 2026 unfolds, every organization faces a choice: Establish a robust fraud prevention strategy now, or risk becoming the next cautionary tale in an increasingly challenging landscape.
Fraud is inevitable. No organization is exempt. Leading companies adopt a continuous improvement framework: Anticipate, prepare, contain, learn, fortify, and evolve.
Effective prevention starts now
The question isn’t which organization will become 2026’s next fraud headline. It's whether your company will be prepared. Effective prevention begins now. To build our strategy, let’s review critical insights from 2025:
- $534 billion was lost to global fraud in 2025, according to TransUnion’s fraud trend survey of 1,200 business leaders. That’s nearly 8% of revenues. U.S. businesses fared worse: Nearly 10% of revenues were lost to fraud, a 46% increase over the year prior and 27% higher than the global average.
- The greatest source of loss cited by respondents was authorized fraud, the type of scam that tricks victims into initiating payments. This scam is also called authorized push payment (APP) fraud because victims unwittingly push their own funds into a scammer’s account. This insidious threat was followed in frequency by account takeover (ATO) and synthetic identity fraud.
- ATO fraud losses in 2025 projected at $17 billion, according to Sift’s Q3 2025 Digital Trust Index. Sectors hit the hardest: Finance with a 122% increase over the year prior; travel/ticketing with a 56% surge; and internet/software platforms with a 17% rise in ATO attacks last year.
Collective fraud management
Fraud prevention is everyone’s responsibility, not just that of IT, legal, finance, or an external consultant. Organizations that treat fraud as a narrow, siloed function pay the price in mounting losses. Cross-functional ownership is essential.
Fraud doesn’t respect organizational charts. It exploits them. When fraudsters abuse free trial offers, launch payment attacks, or execute account takeovers, they don’t target a single department; they exploit the gaps between them. For example:
Marketing sees suspicious signups but can’t block transactions.
Finance detects unusual payments but lacks visibility into customer behavior.
IT implements security controls without understanding operational impact.
Customer service handles complaints in isolation from the fraud patterns driving them.
The result? Fraudsters move seamlessly between channels and departments, completing attacks while no single team sees the full picture.
3 tactics to tackle fraud in 2026
Executive directive: Effective management of fraud risks begins at the top with an executive mandate that champions prevention as a strategic imperative, not just an operational task. This commitment must thread through every department so each team examines its own systems and processes for potential vulnerabilities. With transparent metrics everyone understands, an organization can identify, anticipate, and mitigate the threats of fraud and the unique incarnations 2026 will present.
- Accept the fraud psyche: Cultivating a fraud mindset is an imperative. This means confronting the reality that the marketplace is populated by malicious actors alongside legitimate customers. Decisions, processes, and system design built on the assumption of ethical engagement by the majority leaves vulnerabilities unaddressed.
Instead, adopt a Pareto-type lens, acknowledging that while 80% of interactions may not involve malice, the remaining 20% represent a disproportionate — and potentially devastating — risk from fraudulent activity. This strategic shift from presumptive trust to balanced vigilance is vital and can be conducted efficiently and cost-effectively thanks to artificial intelligence.
Tether fraud to CX: Separating the fraud mandate from the mission to cultivate a great customer experience is a costly miscalculation. The two do not work at cross purposes; they are inextricably linked.
A truly exceptional customer journey relies on a foundation of trust and robust security, making fraud prevention an invisible, yet indispensable, component of an exceptional customer experience.
