Is This The Calm Before The Storm?

After several years of skyrocketing digital fraud (as tracked through LexisNexis® Digital Identity Network® solution), data shows the rate of attacks by humans rising by just 1% last year. That said, the number of attacks is still increasing, and organizations that become complacent are putting themselves at risk. Challenges are still multiplying around the world, and in the communications, mobile and media sector attack rates were up 15% year-over-year (YOY). In other sectors, there was no significant increase in attack rate, suggesting that fraudsters are avoiding organizations with more sophisticated defenses.

But the attack-rate slowdown we’re seeing might be short-lived; fraudsters and scammers are likely retrenching against heightened security. In this report, we explore the tangled web of scams and mules in depth, and show how our data reveals telltale patterns of scam and mule activity. And we’ll demonstrate the value of collaboration as the only way to reliably reduce fraud in today’s complex environment.

Scams dominate global headlines, but organizations today struggle with a wide range of attacks, including the use of compromised or synthetic identities and payment credentials, bonus abuse and first-party fraud. In our detailed look at the relative incidence of these fraud classifications, first-party fraud was the number one reported category.