Trust and safety teams are faced with new fraud challenges on a daily basis. And the stakes are high: either keep up with emerging threats or risk business growth. But with teams deep in the trenches, it’s easy to become siloed in your own industry, or even department. In reality, the global, interconnected Fraud Economy is constantly evolving and targeting businesses that aren’t paying attention to the changing tides. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to unite forces against fraud.

That’s why we launched a new Fraud Intelligence Center—designed to help trust and safety teams dismantle the Fraud Economy. Leveraging data from Sift’s global network of 70 billion events per month, the center helps fraud teams stay informed with up-to-date data, insights, and expert analysis. And as the fraud landscape evolves, our fraud center will reveal the latest fraud rates and trends so you can make decisions confidently and always stay a step ahead of fraud.

Tracking fraud across industries

Fraudsters rarely target only one business or industry. These professional cybercriminals are skilled at their trade, and they know how to employ sophisticated tactics to maximize their ill-willed profit. To shine a light on how they operate, we’ve created an interactive graphic that helps visualize how fraud permeates across industries. By illustrating the number of shared fraud signals between verticals, we can analyze how fraudsters infiltrate different industries with the same tactics—or use stolen credentials or payment information from one company to attack another. Gaming & gambling and cryptocurrency, for example, have a staggering 26,835,748 shared fraud signals across the Sift network, the most among any sub-verticals. 

Monitoring top-targeted verticals

No matter which vertical your business operates in, it’s important to always keep a finger on the pulse of industry fraud rates and how yours compares. And if you’re in a high-risk sector, that’s all the more reason to stay hyper-aware of fraud trends and looming threats. 

In 2021, digital wallets, ticketing & events, and payment service providers (PSPs) saw the largest increases in attempted payment fraud reported by Sift. But we can also cut the data even further, by looking at regional targets as well. While many fraud rings and organized attacks can be global in nature, each region of the world also has a unique fraud landscape. When comparing North America to Asia, for example, we see both share high levels of fraud in PSPs, but North America fights more fraud in digital wallets and gaming & gambling, while Asia is busier with crypto and buy now, pay later (BNPL) fraud.

Exposing global fraud rings

At Sift, we’re dedicated to tracking down and exposing fraud rings that pose a threat to the global economy, including Cart Crasher, Proxy Phantom, and Pig Butchering. Our data science team actively hunts for large-scale attacks and shuts them down before they can cause widespread damage. To help understand these complex fraud operations, we’ve built out step-by-step simulations that detail how they work. The Proxy Phantom visualization shows how the fraud ring used bots to commit expansive account takeover attacks against e-commerce merchants across the globe. This operation used more than 1.5 million compromised credentials in automated credential stuffing attacks across multiple regions, resulting in as many as 2,691 blocked login attempts per second.

Check out our Fraud Intelligence Center to see more fraud in action.