European Central Bank and European Banking Authority joint report finds EEA payment fraud rose to EUR 4.2 billion in 2024 despite stable fraud rate

The European Banking Authority and the European Central Bank published the 2025 edition of their joint report on payment fraud, covering semi-annual industry data from 2022 to 2024 across the European Economic Area (EEA). The report finds that the fraud rate in 2024 was broadly stable at around 0.002% of the total value of transactions, but the total value of reported fraud rose to EUR 4.2 billion from EUR 3.5 billion in 2023. The analysis confirms that strong customer authentication (SCA), mandated under the revised EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2) in 2020, has contributed to lower fraud for the types it was designed to mitigate, especially for card payments, where SCA-verified transactions were generally less susceptible to fraud. For credit transfers the effect was less clear, and card payment fraud was 17 times higher when the payee was outside the EEA, where SCA is not legally required and often not used. The report highlights emerging fraud that targets transactions where SCA exemptions apply or manipulates legitimate users into authenticating fraudulent transactions; in 2024, losses were EUR 2.200 billion for credit transfers (up 16% year on year) and EUR 1.329 billion for card payments with EU/EEA-issued cards (up 29%), with payment service users bearing around 85% of credit transfer fraud losses, mainly linked to scams. Fraud data are collected through semi-annual reporting by payment service providers under PSD2 and the EBA Guidelines on fraud reporting, alongside euro area reporting obligations under the ECB’s payments statistics regulation, with a single data flow to both authorities. The EBA and ECB plan to continue monitoring and publishing fraud data to support policy, supervisory and oversight actions.