PYMNTS Daily Data Dive: Fraud Losses Topped $21B In 2015

Last year, merchants and banks felt fraud losses reach $21.84 billion on all credit, debit and prepaid general-purpose and private-label payment cards issued globally.

According to The Nilson Report stated, this means that for every $100 in volume, 6.97 cents was fraudulent. The number doesn’t come at too much of a surprise considering fraud itself grew by 20.6 percent in 2015, outpacing the growing global card volume.

“The industry’s best defense against counterfeit fraud are EMV cards and the terminals needed to read their chips,” David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, said in a press release. “EMV has been steadily penetrating dozens of countries, but in the U.S., where issuers poured EMV cards into the market, merchants lagged in deploying terminals.”

By 2020, it’s predicted that card fraud worldwide will total $31.67 billion. Despite the fact that fraud has continued to worsen year-over-year, the report shows that the rate of fraud is still lower than the peak years of the 1970s when measured as basis points of total volume.

Here are the numbers:

$8.45 billion | The amount of gross card fraud losses worldwide that the U.S. market accounted for

72% | The percentage of worldwide fraud losses  incurred by card issuers

$6.12 billion | The percentage of worldwide fraud losses incurred by merchants and acquirers

20.6% | The growth percentage of global fraud in 2015

$31.31 trillion | The total global card volume last year

$31.67 billion | The amount of card fraud worldwide that’s expected by 2020