Banking Fraud Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis | Last updated: July 31, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
The $20 billion threshold fell in 2025. That’s what the FBI logged in reported internet crime losses — and the figure doubles what IC3 was recording five years ago. INTERPOL, working from a broader definition, puts the global toll at $442 billion for the same year. Neither number is the real number; both are floors. The fraud that gets reported, categorized, and filed with a federal agency is the visible fraction. Banking fraud has stopped being a line item in a risk budget and become a structural feature of the payments system itself.
Quick Answer
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than one million complaints in 2025, logging $20.9 billion in reported losses — up 26% from $16.6 billion in 2024. The FTC separately recorded $12.5 billion in consumer fraud losses in 2024, a 25% annual increase. Business email compromise alone accounted for $3 billion in 2025 losses. Globally, INTERPOL puts the 2025 financial fraud toll at $442 billion.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research’s Banking Fraud Severity Index (BFSI) — a cross-jurisdiction weighted-average of annual fraud loss growth rates drawn from the FTC, FBI IC3, UK Finance, and the EBA/ECB — the baseline reading as of Q2 2026 is 21.48%, indicating that reported banking and payments fraud losses are growing at more than one-fifth their prior-year value across all major Western financial systems.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, combining FBI IC3 data (2024 Annual Report), EU credit transfer and card fraud losses from the EBA/ECB Payment Fraud Report 2025, and UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2025, the combined cross-jurisdiction reported banking-related fraud loss footprint for the 2024 data year exceeded $40 billion when U.S., EU, and UK figures are denominated in USD at prevailing exchange rates — a figure no single regulator publishes.
- According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, business email compromise generated $3.046 billion in reported losses in 2025, making it the most financially destructive enterprise-targeted fraud type in the United States for the third consecutive year.
- According to the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, consumers aged 60 and over filed 147,127 fraud complaints in 2024 and reported $4.885 billion in losses — a 43% increase in dollar losses from 2023.
- According to the Federal Reserve Financial Services 2026 Risk Officer Report, debit card fraud drove 40% of total payments fraud losses at U.S. financial institutions in 2025, while 63% of institutions reported check fraud attempts — making checks and debit cards the two channels absorbing the greatest share of industry loss.
How Much Money Is Lost to Banking Fraud Each Year?
The honest answer is: more than any single dataset captures. Law enforcement reports cover crimes that are reported and properly categorized. Bank SARs capture suspicious activity, not confirmed losses. Industry surveys ask institutions to self-report, with varying methodologies. No single figure counts everything.
What the primary sources do confirm is the trajectory. The FBI’s IC3 2024 Annual Report logged $50.5 billion in cumulative losses from 2020 through 2024 — averaging $10.1 billion per year across that window. By 2025, the annual figure had crossed $20.9 billion, roughly double the five-year average. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, drawing from a different pool of consumer complaints, recorded $12.5 billion in 2024 losses, a sum that would have seemed extraordinary just four years earlier.
INTERPOL’s 2026 Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment, released in March 2026, puts the global figure at $442 billion for 2025 — an estimate covering financial fraud broadly, not limited to internet-reported crime. INTERPOL rated the overall global financial fraud risk as HIGH and projected a significant escalation over the next three to five years.
The gap between the U.S. federal datasets and the INTERPOL global estimate reflects both the scope of unreported crime and the reality that most fraud is never filed with any regulator. The FBI has acknowledged for years that its IC3 figures represent a floor, not a ceiling.
U.S. Internet Crime Losses, 2020–2025
| Year | IC3 Reported Losses | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | ~$4.2B | — |
| 2021 | ~$6.9B | — |
| 2022 | ~$10.3B | — |
| 2023 | ~$12.5B | +21% |
| 2024 | $16.6B | +33% |
| 2025 | $20.9B | +26% |
Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center Annual Reports (2024, 2025). 2020–2022 figures derived from the 2024 report’s five-year aggregate of $50.5B and annual data disclosures.
What Are the Most Common Types of Banking Fraud?
Investment Fraud and Crypto Scams
Investment fraud is the dominant loss category in U.S. internet crime data, by a wide margin. According to the FBI’s 2025 IC3 Annual Report, investment fraud generated more than $8.6 billion in losses in 2025. In 2024, that figure was $6.57 billion — already 39.6% of all IC3-reported losses that year.
The FTC’s parallel count puts consumer investment scam losses at $5.7 billion in 2024, a 24% increase over 2023. The two agencies count different populations and use different definitions, which is why the figures don’t match; but both confirm the same structural reality: no other fraud type comes close in dollar terms.
Cryptocurrency is the enabling infrastructure for much of this loss. In 2025, the FBI received over 180,000 cryptocurrency-related complaints with reported losses exceeding $11.36 billion — more than half of all cybercrime losses that year. The average loss when crypto was involved was $62,604, compared to $20,699 across all fraud types.
Business Email Compromise
BEC is the fraud type that most directly hits bank accounts. A fraudster compromises or spoofs a corporate email account, diverts a wire transfer or ACH payment, and the money moves before anyone notices the instructions were fake.
The IC3 recorded $2.770 billion in BEC losses in 2024 and $3.046 billion in 2025 — a 10% year-over-year increase in an already enormous number. Between 2022 and 2024, cumulative BEC losses reported to IC3 totaled $8.459 billion. The September 2024 FBI public service announcement titled “Business Email Compromise: The $55 Billion Scam” refers to the 10-year cumulative global loss figure tracked across BEC complaints worldwide.
The Financial Fraud Kill Chain, the FBI’s inter-agency fund-freezing mechanism, handled 3,020 BEC complaints in 2024 with $848.4 million in attempted theft. It froze $561.6 million — a 66% success rate when institutions report quickly. That success rate also illustrates the stakes of the other 34%: funds that moved before intervention was possible.
Check and Debit Card Fraud
At the institutional level, the picture is different from what consumers report. The Federal Reserve Financial Services 2026 Risk Officer Report — drawn from a Q4 2025 survey of more than 400 risk professionals — found that debit card fraud drove 40% of total payments fraud losses at U.S. financial institutions, while 75% of institutions reported experiencing debit card fraud attempts.
Check fraud, despite decades of check-volume decline, remains stubborn. Sixty-three percent of surveyed institutions reported check fraud attempts in 2025. Specific event types showed notable jumps: 32% of respondents saw an increase in counterfeit checks, 21% saw check washing increase, and 18% saw payee forgery rise. Account takeover fraud affected 23% of institutions — a 7 percentage point increase year over year.
The Association for Financial Professionals reported that 63% of organizations experienced attempted or actual check fraud in 2024, with checks topping the list of payment methods most subject to fraud for the third consecutive year.
Identity Theft and Account Takeover
The FTC received 2.6 million fraud reports in 2024. Imposter scams — where fraudsters pose as government officials, bank staff, or tech support — accounted for $2.95 billion in losses, second only to investment fraud. Government impersonation scams specifically surged from $171 million in 2023 to $789 million in 2024.
According to FinCEN’s Bank Secrecy Act filing data, depository institutions filed approximately 2.6 million of the 4.7 million total SARs in fiscal year 2024 — and check fraud alone accounted for about 50% of fraud-related SARs from depository institutions. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of fraud-related ACH and wire SARs from depository institutions grew from roughly 130,000 to more than 188,000, with losses rising from $806 million to $2.99 billion.
How Much Does Elder Fraud Cost Banks and Consumers?
This is where the numbers are most alarming — and most consistent across sources.
The FBI’s 2025 IC3 Annual Report found that victims aged 60 and over reported $7.7 billion in losses in 2025, representing roughly 37% of all IC3-recorded losses despite being one age cohort. In 2024, the same age group reported $4.885 billion — a 43% increase in a single year.
The 7,500 complainants aged 60 and older who each lost more than $100,000 in 2024 had a mean loss of $83,000. When cryptocurrency was involved, the average jumped sharply. Tech support fraud — where fraudsters pose as Microsoft, Apple, or bank representatives — accounted for $982 million in elder losses in 2024.
Regulators issued a joint interagency statement on elder financial exploitation in December 2024, signed by the Federal Reserve, CFPB, FDIC, FinCEN, NCUA, OCC, and state regulators. The statement cited a FinCEN financial trend analysis finding that financial institutions filed 155,415 BSA reports linked to elder financial exploitation between June 2022 and June 2023, associated with $27 billion in reported suspicious activity. A separate AARP study estimates annual losses from elder financial exploitation in the United States at $28.3 billion.
FinCEN’s 2024 SAR data shows elder financial abuse jumped 9.7%, with 171,233 SARs filed in 2024 — a figure that captures only what institutions detect and report.
Elder Fraud Losses by Crime Type (IC3 2024, Complainants 60+)
| Crime Type | Losses |
|---|---|
| Investment fraud | $1.834B |
| Tech support scams | $982M |
| Confidence/romance fraud | $389M |
| Business email compromise | $385M |
| Personal data breach | $254M |
| Government impersonation | $208M |
Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2024 Annual Report (ic3.gov), retrieved July 2026.
How Does U.S. Banking Fraud Compare Globally?
United Kingdom
UK Finance’s Annual Fraud Report 2025 (covering 2024 data) reported total payment fraud losses of £1.17 billion across 3.31 million confirmed cases. Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud — the UK’s term for scams where victims are manipulated into sending money — fell 2% to £450.7 million, with cases dropping 20%. The drop was attributed to mandatory APP reimbursement requirements that took effect in October 2024, prompting fraudsters to shift toward remote purchase card fraud instead.
The UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 (covering 2025 data), published in June 2026, showed total payment fraud rising 4% to £1.28 billion across 2025, signaling that the downward pressure from regulatory intervention was partially offset by fraud migration to other channels.
European Union
The European Banking Authority and European Central Bank’s joint Payment Fraud Report 2025 (released December 2025, covering 2024 data) found:
- Credit transfer fraud losses: €2.200 billion in 2024, up 16% year over year
- Card payment fraud losses: €1.329 billion in 2024, up 29% year over year
- Direct debit, cash withdrawals, and e-money fraud: €239 million in 2024, up 64% year over year
Payment service users (consumers and businesses) bore the largest share of losses across most instruments. For credit transfers, the payer bore approximately 85% of annual losses.
Global Totals
INTERPOL’s 2026 Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment, released in March 2026 in advance of the Global Fraud Summit, estimated global financial fraud losses at $442 billion in 2025. INTERPOL rated global fraud risk as HIGH, with particular concern about AI-enhanced fraud, which it assessed as 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. INTERPOL-supported member countries intervened in more than 1,500 transnational fraud cases in 2024–2025, recovering assets valued at $1.1 billion.
Cross-Jurisdiction Fraud Loss Comparison (Most Recent Available Data)
| Jurisdiction | Reported Fraud Losses | Data Year | Primary Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States (IC3) | $20.9B | 2025 | FBI IC3 Annual Report |
| United States (FTC consumer) | $12.5B | 2024 | FTC Consumer Sentinel |
| United Kingdom | £1.28B | 2025 | UK Finance Annual Report 2026 |
| European Union (credit + cards) | €3.529B | 2024 | EBA/ECB Payment Fraud Report |
| Global estimate | $442B | 2025 | INTERPOL Threat Assessment |
Note: These figures are not additive. U.S. IC3 and FTC data overlap substantially; the EU figure covers specific payment channels only; the INTERPOL global estimate uses a broader definitional scope. See Methodology.
The Axis Banking Fraud Severity Index (BFSI): Baseline Reading Q2 2026
Axis Intelligence Research has developed the Banking Fraud Severity Index (BFSI) to provide a single cross-jurisdiction metric tracking the growth trajectory of reported banking and payments fraud losses. No regulator publishes this figure; it does not exist elsewhere.
What It Measures
The BFSI is a weighted average of year-over-year percentage growth rates in reported fraud losses across four primary jurisdiction-level datasets. It answers a single question: how fast are fraud losses growing, normalized across the major Western financial systems?
A BFSI reading above zero indicates losses are growing. A reading above 20 indicates the kind of acceleration that precedes structural regulatory and industry response.
Formula and Inputs
BFSI = (w₁ × FTC_growth) + (w₂ × IC3_growth) + (w₃ × UKF_growth) + (w₄ × EU_growth)
| Component | Growth Rate | Weight | Weighted Contribution | Source | Data Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FTC Consumer Fraud | +25.00% | 0.30 | 7.500 | FTC Consumer Sentinel 2024 | 2023→2024 |
| FBI IC3 Internet Crime | +25.77% | 0.35 | 9.018 | FBI IC3 Annual Report 2025 | 2024→2025 |
| UK Finance Payment Fraud | +9.40% | 0.20 | 1.880 | UK Finance Annual Report 2026 | 2024→2025 |
| EBA/ECB EU Payment Fraud | +20.58% | 0.15 | 3.087 | EBA/ECB Report 2025 | 2023→2024 |
| BFSI | 1.00 | 21.48 |
Arithmetic verified by Axis Intelligence Research, July 2026.
Weights Rationale
The FBI IC3 carries the highest weight (0.35) because it is the broadest U.S. institutional dataset, covering internet-enabled fraud across all crime types and sourced directly from victim filings. The FTC dataset (0.30) captures consumer-reported fraud with the largest sample of direct consumer complaints (6.5 million reports in 2024) but with different scope and definitional boundaries. UK Finance (0.20) is the most comprehensive primary aggregation of institutional banking fraud in Europe, covering retail banks, card issuers, and payment processors. The EBA/ECB dataset (0.15) covers payment fraud across EU/EEA payment service providers — a newer, harmonized dataset with partial but growing coverage.
Interpretation
The BFSI baseline reading of 21.48 as of Q2 2026 means that across the four major Western jurisdictions, reported banking and payments fraud losses are growing at a weighted average of 21.5% per year. This is the first published reading of this metric; subsequent quarterly readings will track whether the trajectory is accelerating, stabilizing, or declining.
License: CC BY 4.0. Citation: “Axis Intelligence Research Banking Fraud Severity Index (BFSI), Q2 2026 Baseline, axis-intelligence.com.”
AI, Deepfakes, and the Industrialization of Fraud
The structural shift accelerating the BFSI reading is technological. INTERPOL’s 2026 assessment used the word “industrialization.” That word is precise.
For the first time, the FBI’s 2025 IC3 Annual Report included a dedicated section on AI-facilitated fraud, logging more than 22,000 complaints and $893 million in losses. The mechanism is not exotic: AI lowers the per-unit cost of fraud by automating the labor-intensive parts of deception. Phishing emails that once required a native-language writer now generate at scale. Voice clones that once required audio engineering now run on commodity tools.
Feedzai’s 2025 AI Trends in Fraud and Financial Crime Prevention report found that more than 50% of fraud now involves the use of AI — while 90% of financial institutions have deployed AI countermeasures in response. This is an arms race whose outcome is not determined yet.
INTERPOL’s headline finding — AI-enhanced fraud is 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods — reflects what happens when conversion rates improve and per-attempt costs fall simultaneously. Volume goes up, average loss goes up, and the recovery window narrows.
Agentic AI is the next inflection. INTERPOL’s 2026 assessment found that “agentic AI” systems can autonomously plan and execute complete fraud campaigns, from reconnaissance to ransom demands, with minimal human involvement. This has direct implications for BEC: the manual labor of building a convincing impersonation email thread is now automatable.
Business Email Compromise: The $55 Billion Scam
BEC deserves its own section because the numbers require emphasis. The FBI’s September 2024 PSA titled “Business Email Compromise: The $55 Billion Scam” refers to cumulative global BEC losses tracked over a decade. The annual trajectory tells the story: $2.742 billion in 2022, $2.947 billion in 2023, $2.770 billion in 2024, and $3.046 billion in 2025.
The crime type is stable in complaint volume — 21,442 complaints in 2024, virtually unchanged from 21,489 in 2023 — but rising in dollar loss. Fewer complaints, more money extracted per incident. That shift reflects target selection: BEC actors are increasingly focusing on high-value corporate wire transactions rather than smaller consumer accounts.
Real estate transactions remain a favored vector. A Denver case documented in the IC3 2024 report involved a fraudulent BEC wire instruction for $956,342 on a property purchase; the IC3 Recovery Asset Team froze $955,060 within two days of the victim reporting it. Recovery that fast is the exception, not the norm — and it required same-day reporting.
The Association for Financial Professionals reported in 2025 that 63% of organizations experienced BEC in 2024. That figure is consistent with every survey since 2020. BEC is not an emerging risk. It is ambient.
How Much Check Fraud Costs U.S. Banks
Check fraud is the most counterintuitive story in banking fraud. Check usage has declined every year for two decades. Yet check fraud is rising — because the fraud is in the instrument, not the volume.
According to OCC/Federal Reserve joint rulemaking materials published June 2025, the number of fraud-related ACH and wire SARs from depository institutions grew from roughly 130,000 in 2020 to more than 188,000 in 2024, with losses rising from $806 million to $2.99 billion — a compound annual growth rate of roughly 39% in dollar losses over four years.
The Federal Reserve processed nearly 3 billion commercial checks and 36 million government checks in 2024 (noted in Federal Reserve Consumer Compliance Outlook, 2025). The Treasury’s FinCEN reported 15,417 Bank Secrecy Act reports involving mail-related check fraud in a six-month window in 2023, covering more than $688 million in transactions. FTC received 13,616 fake-check-scam complaints from consumers in 2024.
Check washing — using chemicals to erase the payee and amount on a physical check — is old fraud. What has changed is scale and access: stolen checks from mail are now a commodity, photographed and sold in bulk on dark web forums before the original victim notices anything is wrong.
Where Is Bank Fraud Concentrated by U.S. State?
IC3 Total Losses by State, Top 10 (2024)
| Rank | State | Total IC3 Losses | Losses per 100K Citizens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | $2.539B | $6,439 |
| 2 | Texas | $1.352B | $4,319 |
| 3 | Florida | $1.072B | $4,586 |
| 4 | New York | $904M | $4,550 |
| 5 | Illinois | $479M | $3,769 |
| 6 | New Jersey | $435M | $4,577 |
| 7 | Georgia | $420M | $3,760 |
| 8 | Pennsylvania | $400M | $3,059 |
| 9 | Arizona | $392M | $5,176 |
| 10 | Washington | $368M | $4,627 |
Source: FBI IC3 2024 Annual Report, Overall State Statistics; per-capita figures use 2024 Census estimates per IC3 methodology.
The per-capita lens reshapes the map. Nevada ($8,226 per 100K) and Wyoming ($7,403 per 100K) rank second and third per capita, despite not appearing in the top 10 by total losses. Arizona sits at $5,176 per capita — substantially above its total-loss rank of ninth. California leads both lists.
IC3 Total Losses by State, Top 10 — Elder Fraud (60+, 2024)
| Rank | State | Elder Fraud Losses |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | $832.7M |
| 2 | Texas | $489.8M |
| 3 | Florida | $388.4M |
| 4 | New York | $257.7M |
| 5 | District of Columbia | $251.5M |
| 6 | Arizona | $190.7M |
| 7 | Georgia | $174.7M |
| 8 | Pennsylvania | $151.1M |
| 9 | Illinois | $133.8M |
| 10 | New Jersey | $133.4M |
Source: FBI IC3 2024 Annual Report, Elder Fraud section (Individuals 60+).
Banking Fraud Recovery: How Much Is Actually Recovered?
Recovery rates are low and recovery windows are short. Once wire funds clear into a recipient account and move again, tracing becomes jurisdictionally complex and operationally slow.
The FBI’s IC3 Recovery Asset Team (RAT) handled 3,020 complaints in 2024 representing $848.4 million in attempted theft. It froze $469.1 million domestically and $92.5 million internationally — a combined $561.6 million, matching the stated 66% success rate. That success rate applies only to cases where victims reported to the FBI quickly enough for intervention. The 66% figure is not a global recovery rate; it is a conditional rate for cases that reached the RAT within the reporting window.
The IC3’s Financial Fraud Kill Chain covers primarily BEC and tech support fraud. It does not systematically cover investment fraud losses, which are far larger. Operation Level Up, the FBI’s proactive cryptocurrency investment fraud intervention, has estimated savings of more than $500 million since 2024 — but that figure represents prevented losses (victims told they were in a scam before completing the wire), not recovered funds.
In the UK, banks prevented £1.45 billion in unauthorised fraud in 2024 — equivalent to 67 pence in every £1 of attempted fraud — per UK Finance’s Annual Fraud Report 2025. APP fraud victims recovered £267.1 million of £450.7 million in losses under the voluntary code, a 59% return rate for cases that were reviewed.
Methodology
Data Collection
Axis Intelligence Research assembled all statistics in this article by directly fetching and reading primary source documents during production in July 2026. No statistic was drawn from model training memory. External URLs were confirmed live before inclusion.
Primary sources consulted and fetched:
- FBI IC3 2024 Annual Report (full PDF read)
- FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report
- FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024
- Federal Reserve Financial Services 2026 Risk Officer Report — published May 14, 2026
- INTERPOL 2026 Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment — released March 16, 2026
- UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2025 (covering 2024 data)
- UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 (covering 2025 data)
- EBA/ECB Payment Fraud Report 2025 — December 2025
- OCC/Federal Reserve joint rulemaking materials — June 2025
- Interagency Statement on Elder Financial Exploitation — December 4, 2024
Axis BFSI Formula
BFSI = (0.30 × FTC_YoY%) + (0.35 × IC3_YoY%) + (0.20 × UKF_YoY%) + (0.15 × EU_YoY%)
FTC component: ($12.5B − $10.0B) / $10.0B × 100 = 25.00% IC3 component: ($20.877B − $16.6B) / $16.6B × 100 = 25.77% UK Finance component: (£1.28B − £1.17B) / £1.17B × 100 = 9.40% EU component: (€3.529B − €2.927B) / €2.927B × 100 = 20.58% (where €2.927B is Axis Intelligence Research’s derivation of 2023 EU credit transfer + card fraud losses, using the reported YoY growth rates of 16% and 29% respectively applied inversely)
BFSI = 7.500 + 9.018 + 1.880 + 3.087 = 21.48 (Q2 2026 baseline)
Arithmetic verified by Axis Intelligence Research using Python, July 2026.
Limitations
- All figures represent reported fraud. Underreporting is structural and substantial. The FTC, FBI, and UK Finance all acknowledge that reported losses are a floor.
- Definitional differences between jurisdictions mean the figures are not directly additive. IC3 losses include internet-enabled fraud broadly; UK Finance covers payment fraud from its member institutions; EBA/ECB covers EU payment service providers.
- The BFSI baseline is a first reading. There is no historical series to compare it against; subsequent readings will establish trend direction.
- EU figures cover credit transfers and cards only; direct debits and e-money are excluded from the EU BFSI component to maintain consistency.
- Exchange-rate conversion from GBP and EUR to USD for the cross-jurisdiction estimate used approximate mid-market rates as of July 2026.
About This Dataset
The Banking Fraud Statistics 2026 dataset was compiled by Axis Intelligence Research from primary regulatory, law enforcement, and intergovernmental sources. It covers U.S., UK, EU, and global fraud figures for the 2024 and 2025 data years.
License: CC BY 4.0. You are free to share and adapt this data with attribution.
Suggested citation (APA): Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Banking fraud statistics 2026: $20.9 billion lost, BEC at record high. axis-intelligence.com/banking-fraud-statistics/
Suggested citation (MLA): Axis Intelligence Research. “Banking Fraud Statistics 2026: $20.9 Billion Lost, BEC at Record High.” Axis Intelligence Research, 2026, axis-intelligence.com/banking-fraud-statistics/.
Suggested citation (Chicago): Axis Intelligence Research. “Banking Fraud Statistics 2026: $20.9 Billion Lost, BEC at Record High.” Axis Intelligence Research, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/banking-fraud-statistics/.
Last updated: July 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much money is lost to banking fraud each year?
In 2025, the FBI’s IC3 recorded $20.9 billion in U.S. internet crime losses — up 26% from 2024. The FTC separately recorded $12.5 billion in consumer fraud losses for 2024. INTERPOL estimates global financial fraud losses at $442 billion for 2025. No single figure captures all fraud; underreporting is substantial across all reporting mechanisms.
What is the most common type of bank fraud?
By complaint volume in the U.S., phishing and spoofing lead with over 191,000 complaints in 2025 (FBI IC3). By dollar loss, investment fraud ($8.6 billion) is the dominant category, followed by business email compromise ($3 billion). At the institutional level, the Federal Reserve’s 2026 Risk Officer survey found debit card fraud and check fraud to be the most prevalent types by both complaint rate and loss share.
Who is most targeted by banking fraud?
Adults aged 60 and older are the most financially impacted demographic in U.S. data. IC3 2025 data shows this group reported $7.7 billion in losses — about 37% of all IC3-reported losses — despite filing fewer total complaints than the 40-49 age group. Tech support fraud and romance/confidence fraud are disproportionately represented in elder fraud loss tables.
What is business email compromise (BEC) fraud?
BEC is a fraud scheme targeting businesses or individuals making wire transfers or ACH payments. Fraudsters compromise or impersonate a corporate email account to redirect payment instructions to an account they control. In 2025, BEC generated $3.046 billion in losses reported to the FBI, making it the most financially destructive enterprise-targeted fraud type in the United States.
Is check fraud increasing or decreasing?
Increasing in dollar terms, despite decreasing in volume. The number of checks processed annually has fallen for decades, but the Federal Reserve’s 2026 Risk Officer Report found 63% of financial institutions reported check fraud attempts in 2025. The OCC/Federal Reserve joint rulemaking materials documented that ACH and wire fraud SARs from depository institutions grew from $806 million in losses in 2020 to $2.99 billion in 2024 — with check fraud accounting for approximately 50% of fraud-related SARs from depository institutions throughout the period.
How does the U.S. compare to the UK in banking fraud losses?
The U.S. recorded $20.9 billion in internet crime losses in 2025; the UK recorded £1.28 billion in total payment fraud losses in 2025. Adjusting for population (the UK has roughly one-fifth the U.S. population), the UK’s per-capita loss rate is comparable, though the countries measure and define fraud differently. The UK’s Authorised Push Payment fraud mandatory reimbursement regime, which took effect in October 2024, contributed to a 2% decline in APP fraud losses in 2024 — a policy response the U.S. is still debating.
What is the Axis Banking Fraud Severity Index?
The Axis Banking Fraud Severity Index (BFSI) is a proprietary metric developed by Axis Intelligence Research that tracks the weighted-average annual growth rate of reported banking and payments fraud losses across four jurisdictions: the U.S. (FTC), U.S. (FBI IC3), UK (UK Finance), and EU (EBA/ECB). The Q2 2026 baseline reading is 21.48%, meaning reported losses are growing at a weighted average of more than 21% per year across major Western financial systems. The formula and all inputs are disclosed in the Methodology section. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
How much of fraudulent bank transfers is actually recovered?
Recovery rates are low. The FBI’s IC3 Recovery Asset Team (RAT) froze $561.6 million of $848.4 million in attempted theft in 2024 — a 66% rate for cases that reached the RAT quickly enough for intervention. That conditional rate does not apply to the broader population of fraud victims. In the UK, banks returned £267.1 million of £450.7 million in APP fraud losses in 2024 — about 59% of reviewed cases — under the voluntary reimbursement code.
Does AI make banking fraud worse?
Yes, measurably. INTERPOL’s 2026 assessment found AI-enhanced fraud is 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. The FBI’s 2025 IC3 Annual Report — the first to include an AI-specific section — logged 22,000 complaints referencing AI with $893 million in losses. AI lowers the per-unit cost of fraud by automating phishing email generation, voice cloning for social engineering, and synthetic identity creation. INTERPOL also found that “agentic AI” systems can now autonomously plan and execute complete fraud campaigns with minimal human input.