Report: Two-Thirds of Companies Were Fraud Victims in Last 12 Months

digital fraud

While companies and governments have spent billions to prevent fraud, cybercrime continues to plague businesses of every size.

One recent survey found that 67% of companies fell victim to external fraud in the last 12 months, with 42% saying the fraud cost them up to a 1% loss in revenue due.

Research predicts that fraud losses will total $206 billion between 2021 and 2025, with scammers using tactics such as phishing, social engineering and fake apps designed to trick company employees.

While 38% of companies who took the survey projected the risk of fraud to increase within the next year, many businesses are leveraging new technologies to try to counteract this. Machine learning, data science and shared global intelligence are just some of the techniques being deployed to help companies fend off fraudsters.

These cyber criminals operate around the globe, with different countries seeing varying impacts as local circumstances change.

For example, England and Wales reported 5.1 million cases of fraud for the year ending September 2021, according to a recent study, with fraudsters leveraging an array of schemes.

Advance fee fraud, consumer fraud and retail fraud were the top cybercrime categories, the study found, with many bad actors exploiting the ongoing pandemic to launch new scams. Only 26% of these fraud incidents resulted in loss of money with no reimbursement, the study found.

This marks a 27% increase in fraud attempts compared to the same period in the previous year. Different types of fraud saw different rates of increase, however, with cases of financial investment fraud rising by 42% and advance fee payments fraud by 18%.

For more on what companies are doing to battle fraud, download the Digital Fraud Tracker, a PYMNTS and DataVisor collaboration.