Dive Brief:

• Cyber fraud worldwide climbed last year to a rate of 1.6% across more than 100 billion transactions, driven by a 19% increase in attacks via bots and synthetic identity schemes, according to a March report from LexisNexis Risk Solutions. The fraud showed up most frequently in gaming, gambling and e-commerce spheres, the report said.
• The rate of fraud remained “steady” in the North America region at about 2.2%, but attacks in the region targeting desktop computers climbed, according to the 2026 Cybercrime Report.
• “Fraud attempts and scams of increasing sophistication are continuously scouring defenses for weaknesses, so they can target the vulnerable, the uninformed or innocent people simply caught out in a moment of distraction,” the report said.

Dive Insight:

The Atlanta-based consulting firm analyzed 116 billion online transactions worldwide to determine the rate of fraud in regions across the world last year, according to a press release last week. That was a 12% increase in the volume of transactions, including payments, logins and new account openings, monitored by the firm’s digital identity network.

The report showed younger generations are embracing mobile and app-based technology for transactions while older generations are more likely to stick to desktop and browser-based forms of commerce.

The increased global fraud rate last year came after it was little changed in 2024, with the report noting that a more threatening, predicted “fraud storm” stoked by artificial intelligence didn’t materialize last year. Nonetheless, there are signs that fraud patterns are shifting.

While fraud attacks initiated by humans increased only 8% last year, over 2024, those triggered by bots surged 59%, according to the report. 

In North America, fraudsters are showing a predilection for attacking desktop users. Indeed, there was a more than doubling in attacks on desktop browser transactions last year in the region while there was a 77% drop in attacks on mobile app transactions. 

That put the region over the global average rate for attacks on desktop transactions, and at the average rate for those on mobile apps.

“The volume of mobile app attacks halved in 2025, with reductions across all regions except for [Europe, the Middle East and Africa], while browser attacks increased dramatically,” the report said. “We have seen attack risk via the mobile app steadily increase the last few years, and the decline seen in 2025 may reflect that organizations are focusing on firming up their fraud detection for mobile app attacks after historically considering it a safe channel.”

Dallas-based firm Zimperium is one such company offering software to financial institutions and corporate clients to aid them in protecting app use by customers and employees. Increasingly, fraudsters are seeking to insert malware in devices by luring users to download free apps for gaming, mortgage calculators or other everyday uses, Zimperium’s vice president of product strategy, Krishna Vishnubhotla, said in an interview last week. 

Once the criminals are able to take over users’ devices, through app-based malware, they seek to repeatedly make small financial transactions to their advantage, he explained. “Here's what [fraudsters are] doing: They are now, when you are not looking, waking up your phone, exercising your banking app, logging in, transferring money,” Vishnubhotla said. “The ability to persist and hide on your phone allows them to do a lot of these things.”

Zimperium, which was acquired by the private equity firm Liberty Strategic Capital for $525 million in 2022, installs its apps on users phones to cue them on how to best avoid trouble and to alert security teams if there’s a problem.

The NexisLexis report pointed to advances in defense technology as helping beat back cyber fraud. It also noted updated government regulations and increased collaboration among institutions as having a positive impact in the fight against fraud. 

Nonetheless, the fraudsters are fine-tuning their assaults too. “Despite several well publicized raids, scam centers around the world continue to expand and flourish,” the report said. “The sheer number of people involved in this mature, industrialized business is a challenge to fraud prevention departments globally.”