Credit Card Fraud Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis | Last updated: August 2, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Credit card and check fraud complaints filed with the FBI rose 45.8% in 2025, to 18,774, while reported losses reached $282,670,235. The average loss per complaint fell 3.0%, to $15,056. Axis Intelligence Research finds card fraud is industrialising: more victims, smaller individual hits, and a widening gap between US and European fraud rates.
Quick Answer
US credit card and check fraud losses reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center totalled $282,670,235 in 2025 across 18,774 complaints — a 41.4% rise in losses and a 45.8% rise in complaint volume over 2024. Separately, the FTC logged 449,032 credit card identity theft reports in 2024, the most recent year with a published breakdown. Axis Intelligence Research estimates the US card-present fraud rate runs 14.2 times the European Economic Area rate on a value-weighted basis.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that FBI-reported credit card and check fraud complaints grew 45.8% in 2025 while the average loss per complaint fell 3.0% — volume growth outpacing value growth for the second consecutive year.
- Axis Intelligence Research estimates the US card-present fraud rate at 9.9 basis points of transaction value in 2023, versus 0.7 basis points in the European Economic Area — a gap of 14.2 times.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds credit card fraud reporting intensity varies 8.2-fold across US states, from an estimated 264 reports per 100,000 residents in Florida to 32 in Wyoming, using the Axis Card Fraud Reporting Intensity measure.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds new-account credit card fraud outnumbers existing-account fraud 7.7 to 1 in FTC reporting — 406,110 new-account reports against 52,428 existing-account reports in 2024.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds losses to credit card and check fraud among Americans aged 60 and over more than doubled in 2025, rising 112.6% to $71,880,416 while complaints from that group rose 61.2%.
How Much Credit Card Fraud Was Reported in 2025?
Two federal agencies count card fraud, and they count different things. Neither number is the number, which is precisely why most published “credit card fraud statistics” are wrong before they reach the second paragraph.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center tracks a category it calls Credit Card Fraud/Check Fraud, defined in its own appendix as theft or fraud committed using a credit card “or any similar payment mechanism (ACH, EFT, recurring charge, etc.)” as a fraudulent source of funds. The 2025 IC3 Annual Report puts that category at 18,774 complaints and $282,670,235 in reported losses.
FBI IC3 credit card and check fraud, 2023–2025
| Year | Complaints | Reported losses | Average loss per complaint | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 13,718 | $173,627,614 | $12,657 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 2024 | 12,876 | $199,889,841 | $15,524 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 2025 | 18,774 | $282,670,235 | $15,056 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
Average loss per complaint calculated by Axis Intelligence Research (losses ÷ complaints).
Set that against the whole of IC3’s caseload and the proportions matter more than the absolute figure. IC3 recorded 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in losses across all crime types in 2025. Card and check fraud is 1.86% of complaints and 1.35% of losses. It is a high-frequency, mid-severity crime sitting inside a dataset dominated by investment fraud, which alone accounted for $8,648,617,756. Our full breakdown of US cybercrime losses covers how the $20.877 billion total distributes across every IC3 category.
What the FTC’s identity theft data adds
The Federal Trade Commission counts differently. Its Consumer Sentinel Network logs credit card fraud as a type of identity theft — someone’s information misused on an existing card or to open a new one — rather than as a loss event. On that basis, credit card fraud is the single largest identity theft category in the country.
| Year | Credit card identity theft reports | Year-over-year change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 393,446 | — | FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 |
| 2021 | 389,790 | −0.9% | FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 |
| 2022 | 440,675 | +13.1% | FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 |
| 2023 | 416,579 | −5.5% | FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 |
| 2024 | 449,032 | +7.8% | FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 |
Year-over-year changes calculated by Axis Intelligence Research.
In 2024 the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network received 6,471,708 reports in total, of which 1,135,291 were identity theft. Credit card fraud accounted for 39.6% of those identity theft reports — the top type, ahead of “other identity theft” (358,993) and loan or lease fraud (176,400).
Why 2025 FTC numbers are not in this dataset
As of August 2, 2026, the FTC has not published a Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book for 2025. The agency’s own report index lists the 2024 edition, published March 2025, as the most recent. What the Commission has released for 2025 is aggregate: a June 2026 announcement stating that about $16 billion was reported lost to fraud of all types in 2025, up roughly 25% on 2024, with $3.5 billion of that lost to imposter scams.
There is no published 2025 credit card breakdown. Axis Intelligence Research does not estimate one. For the categories the FTC and FBI have released in full for 2025, see our analysis of reported US fraud losses across all channels. Several widely circulated 2026 articles quote partial-year 2025 figures — around 503,000 credit card fraud reports through the third quarter — drawn from the FTC’s quarterly dashboard rather than the annual data book. Those are not annual figures, they are not final, and they are not used here.
Sarah Davis, Digital Finance Editor: The two agencies are measuring different points on the same chain. IC3 counts the moment money leaves. The FTC counts the moment an identity is misused. A stolen card number used to open three accounts is one identity theft cluster to the FTC and potentially zero IC3 complaints if the issuer eats the loss and never gets reported. Anyone quoting a single “total cost of credit card fraud” figure has quietly merged two incompatible methodologies and hoped nobody checks the footnotes.
Which States Have the Most Credit Card Fraud?
Federal agencies publish identity theft reports per capita by state, and they publish the credit card share of identity theft reports by state. Nobody publishes the product of the two. Axis Intelligence Research does.
The Axis Card Fraud Reporting Intensity (CFRI)
CFRI = (state identity theft reports per 100,000 residents) × (credit card share of that state’s identity theft reports)
Both inputs come from the same primary document — the FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, state rankings page and individual state pages. The result estimates credit-card-related identity theft reports per 100,000 residents, which is the number a journalist, regulator or issuer actually wants and cannot currently get anywhere.
Worked example, Florida: 528 identity theft reports per 100,000 residents × 50% credit card share = 264.0.
This is an estimate, not an observed count, for one specific reason disclosed in the source: consumers can report more than one type of identity theft in a single report, and the FTC notes that 14% of 2024 identity theft reports included more than one type. The credit card share is therefore a share of reports mentioning credit card fraud, not a mutually exclusive slice. CFRI inherits that property.
Credit card fraud by state: top 10 (2024 baseline)
| Rank | State | ID theft reports per 100K | Credit card share | CFRI (est. reports per 100K) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Florida | 528 | 50% | 264.0 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 2 | Georgia | 517 | 47% | 243.0 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 3 | Nevada | 466 | 46% | 214.4 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 4 | Delaware | 392 | 45% | 176.4 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 5 | California | 356 | 49% | 174.4 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 6 | Massachusetts | 388 | 42% | 163.0 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 7 | Louisiana | 346 | 44% | 152.2 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 8 | Texas | 393 | 38% | 149.3 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 9 | Maryland | 324 | 45% | 145.8 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 10 | Illinois | 339 | 41% | 139.0 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
Credit card fraud by state: bottom 10 (2024 baseline)
| Rank | State | ID theft reports per 100K | Credit card share | CFRI (est. reports per 100K) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 41 | Iowa | 123 | 34% | 41.8 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 42 | Idaho | 125 | 33% | 41.2 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 43 | Montana | 131 | 30% | 39.3 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 44 | Maine | 127 | 30% | 38.1 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 45 | North Dakota | 119 | 31% | 36.9 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 46 | Vermont | 101 | 34% | 34.3 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 47 | Alaska | 106 | 32% | 33.9 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 48 | West Virginia | 113 | 30% | 33.9 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 49 | South Dakota | 94 | 35% | 32.9 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
| 50 | Wyoming | 120 | 27% | 32.4 | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 / Axis calculation |
The full 50-state CFRI table ships in the downloadable dataset.
What the spread actually shows
The national CFRI benchmark is 117.7 reports per 100,000 residents, derived by applying the national credit card share of identity theft reports (39.6%) to the implied 50-state reporting rate in the FTC’s own table. Florida runs 2.24 times that benchmark. South Dakota runs 0.28 times it. Top-to-bottom, Florida to Wyoming, the spread is 8.2 times.
Two mechanisms are doing the work, and they pull in different directions. High-CFRI states cluster around large retiree populations, dense tourism, and heavy card-present retail volume — Florida, Nevada, Delaware. But the credit card share of identity theft moves separately from the overall identity theft rate: Massachusetts ranks 6th on identity theft per capita but only 6th on CFRI because its credit card share (42%) is lower than Florida’s (50%), while Texas has the 4th-highest identity theft rate and falls to 8th on CFRI on a 38% share.
Sarah Davis: Reporting intensity is not incidence. A state with good consumer-protection infrastructure and an attorney general who publicises the reporting channel will look worse on this measure than a state where victims call the issuer, get a provisional credit within 48 hours, and never file anything federal. That is the honest limitation. It is also why the ranking is useful — it maps where the reported exposure sits, which is what enforcement resourcing follows.
Is New-Account or Existing-Account Card Fraud More Common?
Overwhelmingly new-account. This is the single most under-reported structural fact in US card fraud, and it inverts the mental model most cardholders carry.
| Subtype | 2024 reports | Share of credit card identity theft reports | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| New accounts | 406,110 | 90.4% | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 |
| Existing accounts | 52,428 | 11.7% | FTC CSN Data Book 2024 |
Shares calculated by Axis Intelligence Research against the 449,032 category total. Subtypes sum to more than the total because consumers can report more than one subtype; the FTC notes 14% of 2024 identity theft reports included more than one type.
The ratio is 7.7 to 1. Criminals are not, in the main, running up charges on the card in your wallet. They are opening cards in your name that you do not know exist, using data harvested elsewhere — breach dumps, infostealer logs and the criminal markets where stolen card records are priced and resold. That reframes the mitigation: transaction alerts on your existing accounts do nothing about the dominant attack pattern. A credit freeze does.
How Does the US Card Fraud Rate Compare With Europe?
Badly. And the comparison is available in primary sources that almost nobody puts side by side.
A fraud rate — fraud value divided by transaction value, expressed in basis points — is the only way to compare markets of different sizes. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City published exactly that in February 2026, drawing on the Federal Reserve Board’s biennial debit card report for 2023 data, alongside the equivalent rates for Australia and the European Economic Area.
Card-present fraud rates by market, 2023
| Market | Card-present fraud rate | Scope | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| US, dual-message networks | 14.2 bps | Non-prepaid debit | Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (Hayashi, 2026) |
| US, single-message networks | 5.1 bps | Non-prepaid debit | Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (Hayashi, 2026) |
| US, value-weighted | 9.9 bps | Non-prepaid debit | Axis Intelligence Research calculation |
| Australia | 1.0 bps | Credit and debit | Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (Hayashi, 2026) |
| European Economic Area | 0.7 bps | Credit and debit | Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (Hayashi, 2026) |
The Axis Card-Present Fraud Gap
Weighted US rate = (5.1 bps × 0.47) + (14.2 bps × 0.53) = 9.92 bps
The 47/53 weights are the Kansas City Fed’s own stated split of card-present debit transaction value between single- and dual-message networks in 2023. Against the EEA’s 0.7 bps, that is a gap of 14.2 times. Against Australia’s 1.0 bps, 9.9 times.
Three limitations, stated plainly because they matter. The US figure covers non-prepaid debit cards only, drawn from issuers subject to Regulation II’s interchange cap — issuers that account for more than two-thirds of non-prepaid debit transaction value. The comparator figures cover credit and debit together. And 2023 is the most recent year for which the Federal Reserve Board has published this series. The gap is directionally robust and an order of magnitude wide; the precise multiple is not.
Axis Intelligence Research does not publish a US-versus-EEA card-not-present ratio. The Kansas City Fed states that both US network types exceeded Australia’s 19.2 bps and the EEA’s 10.3 bps CNP rates in 2023, but does not give the US CNP figure as a number in text. Computing a ratio from a chart reading would be manufacturing precision. The finding stands as directional only.
What the European data shows
The European Central Bank and European Banking Authority reported total EEA payment fraud of €4.2 billion in 2024, up from €3.5 billion in 2023 and €3.4 billion in 2022 — a 20.0% rise year over year against a fraud rate that stayed stable at roughly 0.002% of total transaction value. Card payment losses on EU/EEA-issued cards were €1.329 billion in 2024, a 29% increase.
The single most useful number in that report for anyone arguing about authentication policy: card payment fraud ran 17 times higher when the payment recipient sat outside the EEA, where strong customer authentication is not legally required and generally not implemented.
Sarah Davis: That 17× is the whole argument in one figure. The EEA did not out-innovate the US on fraud detection; it made an authentication step mandatory and then watched fraud migrate to wherever the mandate stopped applying. The gap between 0.7 and 9.9 basis points is not a technology gap. It is a regulatory-perimeter gap, and it shows up on the issuer’s chargeback line every quarter.
Who Loses the Most Money to Credit Card Fraud?
Credit card and check fraud by age group, 2025
| Age group | Complaints | Reported losses | Average loss | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 20 | 451 | $606,192 | $1,344 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 20–29 | 1,760 | $6,076,760 | $3,453 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 30–39 | 2,767 | $32,039,262 | $11,579 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 40–49 | 2,958 | $49,971,180 | $16,894 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 50–59 | 2,810 | $43,817,766 | $15,594 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 60 and over | 5,200 | $71,880,416 | $13,823 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
Average loss calculated by Axis Intelligence Research. Age-identified complaints total 15,946 of 18,774 (84.9%) and $204,391,576 of $282,670,235 (72.3%); the remainder had no age data.
The elder acceleration
Complainants aged 60 and over accounted for 27.7% of credit card and check fraud complaints and 25.4% of losses in 2025. That looks proportionate. The trajectory does not.
| Metric, 60+ | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2024→2025 change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Complaints | 3,182 | 3,226 | 5,200 | +61.2% | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| Reported losses | $37,862,023 | $33,813,267 | $71,880,416 | +112.6% | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
Changes calculated by Axis Intelligence Research.
Losses among the over-60s more than doubled in a single year while complaints rose 61.2% — meaning average loss per elder complaint rose too, against a falling national average. This sits inside a broader IC3 pattern: elder fraud complaints across all crime types reached 201,266 in 2025, up 37%, with losses of $7.748 billion, up 59%.
Is Card-Not-Present Fraud Still Growing?
Yes, in cases. Not in average value. The UK publishes the cleanest series on this, and the UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 makes the structural shift unmissable.
UK card fraud by type, 2025
| Fraud type | Losses | Share of card losses | Cases | Average per case | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Remote purchase (CNP) | £423.5m | 71.2% | 3,196,962 | £132 | UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 |
| Lost and stolen | £109.8m | 18.5% | 449,189 | £244 | UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 |
| Card ID theft | £54.0m | 9.1% | 103,171 | £523 | UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 |
| Counterfeit | £4.7m | 0.8% | 18,477 | £254 | UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 |
| Card not received | £2.8m | 0.5% | 7,888 | £355 | UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 |
| Total, UK-issued cards | £594.9m | 100% | 3,775,687 | £158 | UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 |
Shares and per-case averages calculated by Axis Intelligence Research.
Total UK card fraud losses were essentially flat in 2025 — £594.9 million against £592.5 million in 2024 — while case volumes rose 10.7%. Against the 2018 loss peak, 2025 losses are 11.4% lower and case counts 44.2% higher.
The average loss per UK card fraud case has fallen from £339 in 2016 to £158 in 2025, a 53.6% decline. For remote purchase fraud specifically, UK Finance puts the fall at £300 in 2016 to £132 in 2025.
UK Finance also publishes a genuine card fraud rate: a fraud-to-turnover ratio of 0.057% in 2025 — 5.7 basis points — down from 8.4 basis points in 2016, a 32.1% reduction across the decade.
The high-volume, low-value convergence
Two independent datasets, two jurisdictions, one signal:
| Jurisdiction | Volume change, 2024→2025 | Loss change, 2024→2025 | Average per case change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US (FBI IC3 credit card/check fraud) | +45.8% | +41.4% | −3.0% | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| UK (UK Finance, UK-issued cards) | +10.7% | +0.4% | −9.3% | UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 |
All changes calculated by Axis Intelligence Research.
Axis Intelligence Research finds this convergence to be the defining structural feature of 2025 card fraud: criminals are attacking far more cards for far less each, which is what happens when the marginal cost of an attack attempt approaches zero and authentication friction caps the size of any single successful hit.
UK Finance attributes the pattern in part to social engineering that extracts one-time passcodes, which are then used to register digital wallets or push through individual transactions — a tactic that bypasses strong customer authentication rather than breaking it. The credential-harvesting stage that feeds it is tracked in our phishing loss and volume data.
Sarah Davis: A falling average loss reads like progress on a slide. It is not. The bank refunds the £132 and absorbs it; the cardholder absorbs the reissue, the failed direct debits, and the afternoon on the phone. Spread across 3.2 million UK cases, that administrative cost never appears in a fraud statistic — and it is exactly the cost the high-volume model is designed to offload.
How Much AI-Enabled Card Fraud Is Being Reported?
Less than the marketing suggests, so far, and the honest answer is that the reporting instrument is young.
IC3 applies an “AI Related” descriptor when a complaint references artificial intelligence. In 2025 it recorded 22,364 such complaints across all crime types, with $893,346,472 in losses. Within credit card and check fraud specifically: 139 complaints and $1,836,105 — 0.74% of card fraud complaints and 0.65% of card fraud losses.
That is a floor, not a ceiling. The descriptor depends on a victim knowing and mentioning that AI was involved, which is unlikely in card fraud where the victim typically never interacts with the attacker. Where victims do interact with an attacker, the measured effect is larger — see our data on AI-generated phishing effectiveness. Cryptocurrency shows up more often in this category: 901 credit card and check fraud complaints carried a crypto nexus in 2025, with $13,423,130 in losses, or 4.8% of complaints.
The Payments Backdrop
Fraud rates need a denominator, and the denominator moved. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 triennial payments study, released July 1, 2026, reported 236.6 billion noncash payments by US consumers and businesses in 2024, with cards accounting for over three quarters of payments by number.
One detail in that release matters for card fraud specifically: credit card payments grew faster than debit card payments for the first time in almost a decade. Rising credit volume against a card-present fraud rate that has barely moved is an arithmetic problem, not a behavioural one. The next denominator shift is already visible in AI-agent-initiated checkout volumes.
Methodology
Data collection. Every figure in this report was retrieved from a primary source document opened and read during production on August 2, 2026. Sources: the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center 2025 Annual Report (ic3.gov); the FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 and the FTC’s June 15, 2026 press release on 2025 fraud data (ftc.gov); the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 2025 triennial payments study initial findings (federalreserve.gov); the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Payments System Research Briefing of February 25, 2026 (Hayashi); the joint European Banking Authority and European Central Bank 2025 Report on Payment Fraud, published December 15, 2025; and the UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026, published June 2026.
What we measure. Reported figures only. IC3 and FTC data reflect complaints voluntarily filed; both agencies state that actual incidence exceeds reported incidence. UK Finance figures are gross losses reported by member firms and represent cards or accounts defrauded, not individual customers.
Formulas for Axis-calculated figures.
- Axis Card Fraud Reporting Intensity (CFRI), v1.0 = (state identity theft reports per 100,000 residents) × (credit card share of that state’s identity theft reports). Inputs: FTC CSN Data Book 2024, pages 21 and 22–73. Snapshot date: 2024 reporting year.
- National CFRI benchmark = (sum of 50-state identity theft reports ÷ implied 50-state population from the FTC table) × 100,000 × 39.6%, where 39.6% = 449,032 ÷ 1,135,291. The implied 50-state population derived from the FTC’s own reports-and-rate table is 331,743,029, which is consistent with Census estimates for the 50 states and serves as an internal validity check.
- Axis Card-Present Fraud Gap = value-weighted US card-present fraud rate ÷ comparator rate. Weighted US rate = (5.1 bps × 0.47) + (14.2 bps × 0.53) = 9.92 bps, using the Kansas City Fed’s stated 2023 value split between single- and dual-message networks.
- Average loss per complaint or case = reported losses ÷ complaints or cases, computed per year and per segment.
- All year-over-year percentage changes are computed from the absolute figures in the dataset.
Arithmetic for every derived figure was verified computationally before publication. As a cross-check, the Axis method reproduces IC3’s own stated 2025 average loss across all crime types ($20,699) and UK Finance’s own stated comparisons to its 2018 peak (losses 11% lower, cases 44% higher).
Limitations.
- No FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book has been published for 2025 as of August 2, 2026. The credit card breakdown in this report is therefore a 2024 baseline. Partial-year 2025 dashboard figures circulating elsewhere are excluded.
- CFRI is an estimate. Consumers can report more than one identity theft type; the FTC states 14% of 2024 identity theft reports did so. CFRI measures reporting intensity, not fraud incidence, and is sensitive to state-level differences in reporting infrastructure.
- The US card-present fraud rate covers non-prepaid debit cards from Regulation II covered issuers only; comparator markets cover credit and debit together. The comparison is directional.
- IC3’s Credit Card Fraud/Check Fraud category combines card and check fraud and includes ACH and EFT mechanisms. It is not a pure credit card measure, and this report never describes it as one.
- UK Finance restates prior-year data. Its 2026 edition reports 2024 UK-issued card losses at £592.5 million; its 2025 edition reported £572.6 million for the same year. UK Finance discloses that “data series are subject to restatement.” This report uses the 2026 edition throughout.
- Global card fraud loss projections published by market research firms are excluded from this dataset because their methodologies are not disclosed in sufficient detail to reconcile with the primary-source figures above.
Editorial independence. Axis Intelligence has no commercial relationship with any issuer, network, processor or vendor named or implied in this report.
About This Dataset
Title: Credit Card Fraud Statistics 2026 — Axis Intelligence Research Dataset
Coverage: United States 2020–2025; European Economic Area 2022–2024; United Kingdom 2016–2025; Australia 2023
Primary sources: FBI IC3 Annual Reports, FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, European Banking Authority and European Central Bank, UK Finance
Derived metrics: Axis Card Fraud Reporting Intensity (CFRI) v1.0, Axis Card-Present Fraud Gap, average loss per complaint and per case, year-over-year change series
Format: CSV, UTF-8, one row per observation, full provenance columns
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
How to Cite This Report
APA Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Credit card fraud statistics 2026: FTC, FBI and Federal Reserve data. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/
MLA Axis Intelligence Research. “Credit Card Fraud Statistics 2026: FTC, FBI and Federal Reserve Data.” Axis Intelligence, 2 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/.
Chicago Axis Intelligence Research. “Credit Card Fraud Statistics 2026: FTC, FBI and Federal Reserve Data.” Axis Intelligence. August 2, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much money was lost to credit card fraud in 2025?
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded $282,670,235 in reported losses from credit card and check fraud in 2025, across 18,774 complaints. That figure captures only fraud reported to IC3 and combines card fraud with check, ACH and EFT fraud. It is not a total cost of US card fraud, and no US agency publishes one.
Which state has the most credit card fraud?
Florida, on every available measure of reported credit card fraud. It ranks first in identity theft reports per capita (528 per 100,000 residents) and has the highest credit card share of those reports (50%), giving it an Axis Card Fraud Reporting Intensity of 264.0 — 2.24 times the national benchmark of 117.7.
Is credit card fraud increasing or decreasing?
Cases are rising sharply; average losses per case are falling. FBI-reported credit card and check fraud complaints rose 45.8% in 2025 while the average loss per complaint fell 3.0%. UK card fraud cases rose 10.7% while total losses were flat. The direction depends entirely on which metric you choose, which is why Axis publishes both.
What is the most common type of credit card fraud?
New-account fraud, by a wide margin. The FTC logged 406,110 reports of credit card fraud involving new accounts in 2024, against 52,428 involving existing accounts — a ratio of 7.7 to 1. Someone opening a card in your name is far more commonly reported than someone using the card you already hold.
Why is the US card fraud rate higher than Europe’s?
The most-cited explanation in primary-source research is authentication policy rather than technology. The EBA and ECB found that card payment fraud was 17 times higher when the recipient sat outside the European Economic Area, where strong customer authentication under PSD2 is not legally required. Axis Intelligence Research estimates the US card-present fraud rate at 9.9 basis points against 0.7 in the EEA, a gap of 14.2 times, using 2023 Federal Reserve data.
How many credit card fraud reports does the FTC receive?
The FTC received 449,032 credit card identity theft reports in 2024, making it the largest identity theft category at 39.6% of the 1,135,291 identity theft reports logged that year. The FTC had not published a 2025 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book as of August 2, 2026.
Are older Americans more affected by credit card fraud?
Their exposure is accelerating fastest. Complainants aged 60 and over accounted for 27.7% of IC3 credit card and check fraud complaints in 2025 — roughly proportionate — but their reported losses rose 112.6% year over year, to $71,880,416, against a 41.4% rise for the category overall.
Is card-not-present fraud the biggest category?
In the UK, decisively: remote purchase fraud accounted for £423.5 million of £594.9 million in 2025 losses on UK-issued cards, or 71.2%, and 84.7% of all cases. US federal reporting does not break card fraud into present and not-present categories, so no equivalent US share can be stated from primary sources.
How reliable are credit card fraud statistics?
Less reliable than most published figures imply. Every US federal number here is a count of voluntary reports, and both the FBI and FTC state that actual incidence exceeds reported incidence. Agencies define card fraud differently, restate prior years, and publish on different schedules. This report states each figure’s source, scope and as-of date so readers can judge each one separately rather than trusting an aggregate.