Mobile fraud is on the rise as its use increases

As trade and mobility become more global, so does cybercrime. ThreatMetrix found that risks are growing in retail, finance, and other industries, especially as cross-border transactions expand. Here are the details on the hot spots—and how cybercriminals are targeting mobile devices.

E-commerce is becoming an increasingly mobile activity, as consumers use their devices for everything from shopping for clothes to rebalancing stock portfolios and doing banking. But even as mobile technology gives consumers a degree of freedom they otherwise wouldn’t have, the risks to personal and financial data are growing.

ThreatMetrix recently released a report based on real-world cybercrime attacks from April 2015 to June 2015, analyzing billions of transactions and detecting and stopping 75 million attacks in real time. It uses metrics from geolocation, device history, and behavioral analytics to help provide a sense of a person’s “digital identity” even as they move across applications, networks, and devices.

Would-be cybercriminals, the report found, typically attempt to “recreate” stolen identities using any number of methods to mask their efforts, including “hooking up” user sessions with malware or other malicious technologies. Therein lies the rub: With the rise in mobile device use for payments, accounting for more than 31 percent of transactions, according to ThreatMetrix, and 20 million new devices being used on its networks each month, the opportunities for fraud are growing at an even pace.

Regionally, the U.S., U.K., and Germany are the top three countries for attack origins. The Dominican Republic and India rounded out the top five in Q2. And in those areas, payment and login attacks took precedence over online fraud and new account fraud among criminals looking to defraud financial institutions—and, as the white paper notes, criminals are “targeting multiple data sets to effectively link consumer credentials.”

In the retail industry, ThreatMetrix detected 36 million e-commerce attacks, up 20 percent from the previous year, preventing losses of $1 billion to $3 billion.

In the financial services sector, particularly in online lending, attacks have focused primarily on new account setups and payment withdrawals, ThreatMetrix said. The research found that the vast majority of transactions in this space, or 83 percent of all financial activity (not just online lending), involved account logins, and of those transactions, ThreatMetrix deemed 2 percent as “high risk” for fraud.

Cross-border transactions are also seeing an increase in fraud, as the report says “it is difficult for companies to know the true digital identities of customers.” As a result, companies are rejecting these transactions much more often than domestic transactions—sometimes three times more often than domestic transactions.

To learn more about this data, download the ThreatMetrix Q2 2015 Cybercrime Report.