Dive Brief:
- Cybercriminals are increasingly using social engineering techniques and artificial intelligence to swindle unsuspecting victims, according to a Visa fraud report released Wednesday.
- Scams were the top form of consumer payment fraud, according to the card network’s Spring 2026 Biannual Threats Report, which analyzed data on both corporate and consumer-level attacks. Visa detected about $1 billion in scam transactions in the latter half of 2025, “making scams the single largest category of consumer payment fraud,” according to a press release that accompanied the report.
- “Fraud is increasingly a problem of behavioral manipulation, ecosystem fragmentation, and accelerated attack cycles enabled by AI,” Visa’s chief risk and client services officer, Paul Fabara, said in the report.
Dive Insight:
Although payment threats are showing signs of slowing, Visa cautioned that fraudsters are exploiting human vulnerabilities and AI to carry out their attacks.
In its report, Visa noted that cybercriminals are using AI to automate their attacks, but the card network also said it is using the technology to block attacks sooner and reduce potential losses.
One key lesson: cybersecurity strategies that involve slow-moving patterns and manual review are no match for threat actors using machines, the report said.
“Criminals are increasingly targeting people rather than technology, using deception, urgency and AI-enabled tools to exploit trust,” Fabara said in the press release.
To address that shift toward people will require “continuous innovation at the network level and close collaboration across banks, merchants, policymakers and the broader payments ecosystem,” he said.
Global ransomware attacks jumped 26% from 2024 to 2025, but less than one quarter (23%) of victims paid ransoms to perpetrators, the report said. Many organizations are reluctant to pay ransoms “as victims have learned paying has little effect on whether their sensitive data is leaked to the public,” the release said.
Of the victimized organizations that paid ransoms, the size of payments plunged 66% between July and September 2025 compared to the prior three months, Visa said in the report. A Visa spokesperson declined to provide additional information about ransoms paid.
Along with Visa, other payments insiders have warned that AI is accelerating fraud.
In a report released in March, Nasdaq’s Verafin unit found that the money pilfered worldwide by online criminals increased by 9.2% last year compared to 2024. AI-enabled or tech-assisted scams saw a 19.6% increase in losses to $14.3 billion, according to the report.
As cybercriminals use AI to tweak their techniques, payment companies are under pressure to adopt technology to fight the rising threat.
The companies are “in a situation where you really need AI to fight AI,” according to Matt Vega, the chief fraud strategist at anti-fraud and compliance company Sardine, who spoke about the issue at the Nacha Smarter Faster Payments Conference last month.
