Neil Doyle
São Paulo, Brazil – 25th September 2026: Apata Limited, the payment authentication provider for banks and merchants, has published the results of its Latin American payments fraud survey. The survey polled payments and fraud professionals working at large payment issuers such as banks and banking-as-a-service providers in the region about the most common fraud trends and biggest challenges their institutions currently face.
Phishing and social engineering are the dominant payment fraud tactics in Latin America, with 47.7% of respondents reporting them as the biggest trend. This was more than twice the 20.5% of respondents who reported BIN attacks as the biggest trend with card testing (13.6%), account takeover (9.1%), new authentication methods (4.5%), and synthetic identity fraud (4.5%) rounding out the fraud trends observed by fraud experts in the region.
“These results show just how prevalent social engineering is becoming as a fraud tactic, no doubt exacerbated by AI. Contextual warnings in e-commerce checkout or app approval challenge pages are becoming an increasingly important consideration for issuers as well as geolocation, IP address, and device data”, observed Gleb Mendrul, Product Manager at Apata.
“Social engineering is here to stay. Issuers may need to consider additional post-evaluations after a transaction has been challenged and approved as another opportunity to evaluate context”.
The survey results are available here
Balancing fraud prevention with transaction approval rates (false declines) was the most commonly reported challenge by the group of payments professionals at 61.4%, followed by real-time decisioning.
“False declines cost the payments ecosystem an estimated $400 billion annually”, said Shekinah Adewumi, CEO at Apata.
“That’s compared to an estimated $48 billion in fraud losses. Fraud leaders in Latin America are assessing how their systems can help them balance their appetite for risk against enabling legitimate cardholders to make legitimate transactions. Social scams being the prevalent fraud trend that makes transactions look legitimate is a big part of how they weigh that risk”, he continued.
“How to approach real time decisioning continues to get more complex for fraud teams. For card not present transactions there is more time available during the authentication phase to run a battery of checks. As social engineering tactics put more pressure on decision windows, issuers could consider pushing more of their fraud checks into the authentication phase”, said Ross Casey, Apata’s Chief Product and Technology Officer.
The publication of the research follows Apata’s recent publication of payment authentication performance benchmarks from its 3DS platform in Latin America, demonstrating time-out rates and error rates as low as 2% and 0.8% for issuers in the region.
ENDS
About Apata
Apata is a payments authentication platform that provides 3-D secure (3DS) access control server solutions to banks and issuers as well as 3DS server solutions to merchants. Headquartered in Dublin, Apata serves global financial institutions handling billions in transaction volume annually with benchmarked payment authentication rates of more than 93%.
