The latest joint EBA-ECB report shows payment fraud in the European Economic Area rose to €4.2 billion in 2024, driven by credit transfer and card payment scams despite strengthened security measures.
Payment fraud across the European Union and European Economic Area (EEA) increased noticeably in 2024, according to the newest joint report by the European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Central Bank (ECB), which analysed semi-annual data from 2022 through 2024. Overall losses from fraud have grown over the period, having reached approximately €4.2 billion in 2024, up from €3.5 billion in 2023 and €3.4 billion in 2022, underscoring the ongoing challenge fraud poses to payment systems.
The report breaks down fraud by payment type, revealing that credit transfers accounted for about €2.5 billion of the total fraud value in 2024, a year-on-year increase of around 16 %, while card payment fraud reached roughly €1.3 billion, up about 29 % versus the previous year. Despite these rises in value, the overall fraud rate remained relatively low at around 0.002 % of total transaction value, highlighting that most transactions occur securely but that large-value scams are particularly costly when they do occur.
Strong customer authentication (SCA), introduced under the EU’s revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), continued to demonstrate a protective effect, especially on card payments. SCA-verified card transactions showed lower fraud rates compared with non-authenticated ones, according to the report. However, the measures are less protective for credit transfers, where fraud often involves manipulating users into authorising high-value transactions.
Another striking pattern was the geographical dimension of fraud: card payment fraud was about 17 times higher when transactions involved recipients outside the EEA, where SCA is not mandated, and security standards vary widely.
The report also highlighted how fraud losses are borne. For credit transfers in 2024, payment service users absorbed approximately 85 % of fraud losses, reflecting the increasing incidence of authorised push payment (APP) scams. By contrast, users bore a smaller share of losses from other payment types, though liability varied significantly across instruments and countries.
Overall, the EBA and ECB concluded that while authentication safeguards have helped reduce some types of fraud, emerging tactics such as payer manipulation and remote-initiated scams require continued innovation in prevention and cross-border cooperation to protect users and financial systems.
