TransUnion has published its latest global Top Fraud Trends Report, covering the first half of 2026, and the headline finding reshapes how financial institutions and retailers should think about fraud exposure. Rather than fabricating new identities at the point of onboarding, fraudsters are now predominantly operating within established customer relationships: 81% of suspected digital fraud globally in H1 2026 occurred during interactions with existing customers.
The report, titled “Fraud in the Age of Continuous Trust”, is based on TransUnion’s proprietary transaction data and a June 2026 survey of business leaders across the US and international markets. Business leaders across sectors estimated fraud losses equivalent to nearly 7% of annual revenue over the past year, a figure that reflects both direct financial losses and the operational cost of remediation.
Phone spoofing and authorised fraud drive losses
Two communication-channel vulnerabilities stand out in the data. Nearly one in five outbound business-to-consumer calls made via US mobile carriers was spoofed in H1 2026, providing fraudsters with a mechanism to impersonate trusted brands and prompt account takeovers or payments. Separately, six in ten business leaders reported their customers were victimised by text spoofing in the past year.
These channels feed directly into authorised fraud, where a victim is manipulated into initiating a transaction or granting account access voluntarily. Scam and authorised fraud was cited as the leading source of losses by 35% of US business leaders and 29% globally, ahead of synthetic identity fraud (18% in both geographies), account takeover (16–17%) and first-party fraud (15–18%).
Brian Killeen, vice president of global identity solutions at TransUnion, said: “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 exposure tied to synthetic identities as of 30 June 2026, and 67% of business leaders expect synthetic identity fraud to increase over the next two years. Fifty-three per cent described it as the threat they are least prepared to address.
AI lowers the cost of attack
The report identifies AI as the structural accelerant. Automation has reduced the unit economics of fraud by handling identity generation, content creation and victim targeting at a scale that previously required significant human effort. Forty-three per cent of US business leaders said the growing scale and sophistication of fraud is placing significant or severe pressure on their organisations.
The industry-level breakdown offers useful precision for risk teams. In financial services, transaction-related activity carries greater fraud risk than account creation, which underscores the need to connect identity, behavioural and transactional signals throughout the customer relationship. In retail, account creation is the primary risk vector given promotion abuse. In online gaming and betting, fraud risk is elevated across the full lifecycle, from bonus abuse at sign-up through account logins and withdrawals.
Regulatory and market read-across
The findings land against a backdrop of intensifying regulatory pressure on authorised push payment fraud. In the UK, the Payment Systems Regulator’s mandatory reimbursement framework, which came into force in October 2024, has put direct financial liability on payment service providers for qualifying APP fraud losses. That shifts the compliance calculus: fraud that exploits trusted channels is no longer simply a customer service problem but a balance-sheet risk for firms caught on the paying side of a spoofed instruction.
Across Europe, DORA’s operational resilience requirements and PSD3’s proposed enhancements to transaction monitoring will further raise the bar for how firms detect anomalies within established customer interactions, not just at onboarding. For financial institutions still calibrating their fraud tooling around front-door identity checks, the TransUnion data is a prompt to re-examine where in the customer lifecycle their defences are thinnest.
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