A new report from TransUnion has found that 81% of digital fraud attacks target existing customer relationships, with more than half of U.S. businesses reporting increased scam and fraud activity over the past year.
“Identity-based fraud attacks often arise before organizations have sufficient information to establish trust in new customers,” the report says. “While account creation is a critical trust-establishing event, most fraud exposure occurs after the customer relationship has already been established. Different risk patterns appear across account creation, login, and financial transaction activities, especially for AI-enabled fraud. For instance, AI can help fraudsters rapidly generate or modify identities, credentials and interactions to target the weakest controls across the customer lifecycle.”
Most respondents cited synthetic identity fraud, which uses exposed consumer information and AI to craft phony personas, as their top concern over the next two years.
“Forty-three percent of U.S. business leaders said the growing scale and sophistication of fraud is placing significant or severe pressure on their organizations,” TransUnion says. “Synthetic identity fraud is a key concern, with 67% expecting it to increase over the next two years and 53% citing it as the threat they are least prepared to address. In the U.S., 51% of business leaders reported increased scam and authorized fraud activity over the past year. U.S. lenders face an estimated $2.4 billion in exposure tied to synthetic identities as of June 30, 2026.”
The increase is partly due to adversarial use of AI tools, which allow attackers to drastically improve the scale and sophistication of social engineering attacks.
“AI has fundamentally changed the economics of fraud by automating activities that once required significant human effort, including creating identities, generating content, and targeting victims,” TransUnion says. “This allows fraudsters to accelerate and scale their attacks faster than organizations can adapt their detection capabilities and mitigation strategies.
TransUnion has the story: https://newsroom.transunion.com/81-of-suspected-digital-fraud-attacks-target-existing-customer-relationships-transunion-finds/
