Ecommerce fraud to exceed $107 Bn by 2029, finds Juniper study

The value of ecommerce fraud will rise from $44.3 billion in 2024 to $107 billion in 2029, a growth of 141%, revealed a new study from Juniper Research. The study found that AI is fuelling the sophistication of attacks across the ecommerce ecosystem, with the use of deepfakes, created using AI, to defeat verification systems being a key threat. This threat, combined with rising levels of ‘friendly fraud’, where fraud is committed by the customer themselves, such as refund fraud, is increasingly threatening merchant profitability.

According to Juniper Research, AI is enabling fraudsters to remain ahead of security measures and commit sophisticated attacks on a greater scale. By creating credible messages and a large number of synthetic identities, AI is facilitating higher quality attacks with an unprecedented frequency. These technologies are also highly scalable; empowering fraudsters to heavily automate their attacks and overwhelm rules-based prevention systems.

Thomas Wilson, author of the report, said, “Ecommerce merchants must seek to integrate fraud prevention systems that offer AI capabilities to quickly identify emerging tactics. This will prove especially important in developed markets, where larger merchants are at higher risk of being targeted for fraud, such as testing stolen credit cards.”

The report said that merchants are employing these same technologies to recognise emerging fraud patterns and react in real-time. Merchants must work to incorporate biometric identification into checkout processes to further secure transactions. By using methods such as liveness detection, merchants will be able to protect their business and customers from increasingly sophisticated AI deepfake fraud attempts.

Juniper Research, which specialises in fintech and payment markets, has, for two decades, provided market intelligence and advisory services to the global financial sector, and is retained by many of the world’s leading banks, intermediaries and providers.