TransUnion has revealed its newest international Top Fraud Trends Report, overlaying the primary half of 2026, and the headline discovering reshapes how monetary establishments and retailers ought to take into consideration fraud publicity. Rather than fabricating new identities on the level of onboarding, fraudsters at the moment are predominantly working inside established buyer relationships: 81% of suspected digital fraud globally in H1 2026 occurred throughout interactions with current clients.
The report, titled “Fraud in the Age of Continuous Trust”, is predicated on TransUnion’s proprietary transaction information and a June 2026 survey of enterprise leaders throughout the US and worldwide markets. Business leaders throughout sectors estimated fraud losses equal to just about 7% of annual income over the previous 12 months, a determine that displays each direct monetary losses and the operational price of remediation.
Phone spoofing and authorised fraud drive losses
Two communication-channel vulnerabilities stand out within the information. Nearly one in 5 outbound business-to-consumer calls made by way of US cellular carriers was spoofed in H1 2026, offering fraudsters with a mechanism to impersonate trusted manufacturers and immediate account takeovers or funds. Separately, six in ten enterprise leaders reported their clients had been victimised by textual content spoofing up to now 12 months.
These channels feed straight into authorised fraud, the place a sufferer is manipulated into initiating a transaction or granting account entry voluntarily. Scam and authorised fraud was cited because the main supply of losses by 35% of US enterprise leaders and 29% globally, forward of artificial id fraud (18% in each geographies), account takeover (16–17%) and first-party fraud (15–18%).
Brian Killeen, vice chairman of international id options at TransUnion, stated: “Harnessing intelligence across the customer lifecycle and applying context to each interaction is critical to identifying emerging threats and enabling trusted interactions.”
US lenders face an estimated $2.4 billion in publicity tied to artificial identities as of 30 June 2026, and 67% of enterprise leaders anticipate artificial id fraud to extend over the subsequent two years. Fifty-three per cent described it because the menace they’re least ready to deal with.
AI lowers the fee of assault
The report identifies AI because the structural accelerant. Automation has decreased the unit economics of fraud by dealing with id era, content material creation and sufferer focusing on at a scale that beforehand required important human effort. Forty-three per cent of US enterprise leaders stated the rising scale and class of fraud is inserting important or extreme stress on their organisations.
The industry-level breakdown affords helpful precision for danger groups. In monetary companies, transaction-related exercise carries better fraud danger than account creation, which underscores the necessity to join id, behavioural and transactional indicators all through the shopper relationship. In retail, account creation is the first danger vector given promotion abuse. In on-line gaming and betting, fraud danger is elevated throughout the total lifecycle, from bonus abuse at sign-up by account logins and withdrawals.
Regulatory and market read-across
The findings land in opposition to a backdrop of intensifying regulatory stress on authorised push fee fraud. In the UK, the Payment Systems Regulator’s obligatory reimbursement framework, which got here into drive in October 2024, has put direct monetary legal responsibility on fee service suppliers for qualifying APP fraud losses. That shifts the compliance calculus: fraud that exploits trusted channels is now not merely a customer support drawback however a balance-sheet danger for companies caught on the paying facet of a spoofed instruction.
Across Europe, DORA’s operational resilience necessities and PSD3’s proposed enhancements to transaction monitoring will additional increase the bar for the way companies detect anomalies inside established buyer interactions, not simply at onboarding. For monetary establishments nonetheless calibrating their fraud tooling round front-door id checks, the TransUnion information is a immediate to re-examine the place within the buyer lifecycle their defences are thinnest.
AI stage 1 of 5: written by Darlyn Ho; AI helped with tone, construction or wording; edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean
