Halfway through 2022, it’s not that the fight against payments fraud has shifted to a whole new ball game. While criminals’ tactics are ever-evolving, the real challenge lies in the breadth and complexity of the fraud. It’s many ball games on many fields, all at once, and that’s the environment confronted by card issuers, merchants, and consumers alike.

Eric Kraus, Vice President of Fraud, Risk and Compliance Solutions at FIS, and John Buzzard, Lead Analyst in the Fraud & Security practice at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the current environment on an installment of PaymentsJournal Podcast, going in-depth on such topics as the evolving nature of fraud, how FIS’s acquisition of Worldpay has fortified efforts to combat fraud, insights gleaned from Javelin’s most recent identity fraud study, the risks of peer-to-peer payments, and ongoing consumer education and the steps needed to preserve and strengthen the connected relationships between card issuers and customers, customers and merchants, and merchants and acquiring banks.

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It’s a lot for all the parties to take in — as Buzzard noted, increases are being seen across almost every area of fraud that is tracked, a situation he described as “joker’s wild” and Kraus called “the Wild West.”

The Current Payments Fraud Environment

Kraus broke down the present situation for both card issuers and merchants.

On the card-issuing side, the biggest fraud challenges are:

* Card enumeration (also known as bank identification number, or BIN, attacks), which Kraus described as “high-velocity number guessing”* Card-not-present fraud* Point-of-sale fraud (such as at automated fuel dispensers)* Account takeover, which is on the rise again after some pandemic-related lows (“We hypothesize that organized crime was focused on other schemes,” including fraud aimed at Paycheck Protection Program recipients, stimulus payments, and unemployment benefits.)

On the merchant side, two big areas of fraud stand out, Kraus noted:

* First-party fraud (“Within our own merchant e-commerce space, we’ve seen numbers as high as 80% of disputes being of a first-party nature.”)* Digital skimming, which he noted can become the “feeding ground” for fraud against bank...