Card theft and account breaches remain major threats, but some of today’s fastest-growing fraud schemes begin earlier by targeting identity itself. Criminals increasingly use artificial intelligence to build false identities and mimic real voices and faces well enough to slip past existing checks. That leaves issuers with an additional question: not only whether a transaction looks risky, but whether the person behind it exists at all.
Bankrate’s 2026 survey shows how fast this is moving. Financial scams hit 40% of consumers in the last year, up from 34% a year earlier, with AI cited as a major driver. UK Finance tracked a steeper climb still, with scam attempts up 62% across more than 100 million accounts at nine financial institutions, and phishing up 140%.
PYMNTS Intelligence found that unauthorized-party fraud, cases where someone other than the account holder initiates the transaction, now accounts for 71% of incidents and dollar losses. That is up from 48% a year earlier. Other schemes skip hacking entirely. In authorized push payment fraud, the fraudster talks the victim into sending the money directly.
The tools issuers rely on to confirm someone is who they claim to be are exactly what AI has gotten good at faking. Paymentology CTO Tim Joslyn told PYMNTS Intelligence that voice authentication has already failed, leaving banks that lean on it exposed. Selfies, videos and behavioral biometrics face similar erosion as automated systems learn to mimic human timing. His deeper worry is behavior that looks ordinary every time it repeats, which is often the clearest sign it isn’t human.
Instead of re-checking identity at every login, issuers are testing a model where trust builds session by session, and only unusual behavior triggers a harder look. Tokenization plays a similar role, swapping a static card number for a credential that specifies what a customer or an AI agent can use it for. PYMNTS Intelligence found that 68% of high-customer-lifetime-value (CLTV) issuers already call stronger security essential for AI agents making purchases.
None of this works if issuers keep defending against yesterday’s fraud. A stolen card and a convincing fake customer need different defenses, and telling them apart in real time is what protects customers without slowing them down.
Read the tracker now: When Fraud Becomes the Customer: The Next Battlefront for Issuers
About the Tracker
The Payments Innovation Tracker® is a PYMNTS Intelligence collaboration with Paymentology. looks at how AI-driven identity fraud is changing what issuers need from their defenses, and why continuous verification and scoped payment credentials are becoming part of the answer.
