Losses from Online Payment Fraud Expected to Reach $48 Billion Annually

If you believe this week’s report from Juniper Research, online payment fraud is expected more than double in the next five years going from a mere $22  billion in losses this year to $48 billion in losses by 2023.

The industry recovers that money by raising prices.

This cost is about $150 for every man, woman, child and baby in the United States every single year.

What is interesting is that the crooks are morphing their attacks.  They are stealing the data and using it to build fake identities.  They use those identities to commit fraud,

From a business standpoint, businesses are not prepared to deal with this “synthetic identity” attack and will continue to lose billions of dollars to this type of attack.

From the consumer standpoint, consumers need to demand that businesses improve their security.  The Equifax breach was not the result of some incredibly exotic attack method figured out by cyber geniuses.  It was just that Equifax forgot to install some known patches.

In addition, consumers need to improve their own security – simple things like patching their phones regularly, uninstalling apps that they don’t use any more and not clicking on phishing links.

Likely laws will wind up being passed, whether that will help or not.

To put this in perspective, $48 billion represents every dollar of Apple’s profit in a year or roughly the entire revenue of HP.

Information for this post came from Help Net Security.

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