Fraud and Payments by the Numbers: 7 Stats from February
In this industry, we see a lot of numbers cross our (virtual and actual) desks each month – and frankly, it can be hard to keep up. Sometimes, insightful tidbits can get buried in the hullaballoo. That’s why we’ve gathered some of the most interesting recent stats in one place for this post. So, here goes…
93%
It seems that retail data breaches fell by this massive percentage between 2014 and 2015. Sounds positive, right? Not so fast…turns out hackers may be targeting the government and healthcare sectors instead. So that means more personal information is being compromised. As Jason Hart, VP and CTO for Data Protection at Gemalto explained, “If consumers’ entire personal data and identities are being co-opted again and again by cyber thieves, trust will increasingly become the centrepiece in the calculus of which companies consumers do business with.”
10%
That’s the percentage of new profiles created on dating sites which were flagged as fake, according to an analysis of Sift Science data. Yeah, we don’t know if that’s higher than we expected… or lower. We’re just glad that we’re helping to keep scammy listings like these off of dating sites, because the sad truth is that so-called romance scams cost victims more than $82 million in the last six months of 2014 alone.
$1.3 trillion
The amount that “web-influenced sales” could total this year, according to Forrester. What the heck does “web-influenced” mean, you ask? It means any purchase influenced by the Internet, including all that research (reviews, price comparison) shoppers do with their mobile phones while they’re in a physical store. Yeah, now the “trillion” totally makes sense!
37%
That’s the smaller-than-expected percentage of retailers who’ve migrated to EMV in their brick-and-mortar stores. Jared Drieling of The Strawhecker Group said the low adoption rate is probably due to merchants not wanting to slow down or confuse customers during the all-important holiday shopping season. You’ve probably shuffled along in several slow-moving lines where customers try to figure out dipping instead of swiping, right? Who can really blame retailers for putting this off?
6-9%
According to the National Retail Federation, that’s how much “nonstore” sales (which include e-commerce) are predicted to rise this year – thanks in part to continued low unemployment and lower gas prices. Fingers crossed!
80%
This reflects the proportion of online businesses facing fraud who plan to automate more of their fraud prevention in 2016, according to the Sift Science Fraud-Fighting Trends Report. We thought it would be high, but we didn’t know it’d be 4 out of 5. Here’s to working smarter in 2016!
13.1 million
That unfortunate number tells us how many U.S. consumers were victims of identity theft in 2015, according to Javelin Strategy. And guess what? Javelin suggests that EMV is partly to blame, saying, “Fraudsters have reacted by moving away from existing card fraud to focus on new account fraud.”
