E-frauds from India halve in Q1 – Times of India

MUMBAI: Online fraud attempts originating from India almost halved in the first quarter of FY22 when compared with Q1FY21 even as they rose globally.
According to TransUnion’s latest quarterly analysis, fraudsters in India are re-focusing their efforts from financial services to travel & leisure, online forums and logistics industries. The decline in fraud in India is being attributed to stronger fraud control measures being adopted by the financial services industry.
Across industries, the rate of digital fraud attempts rose 16.5% globally when comparing Q1FY22 to Q1FY21. However, for transactions coming from India, the percentage of digital fraud attempts decreased at a rate of over 49% during the same period.

Gaming and travel & leisure were the two most impacted industries globally for the suspected digital fraud attempt rate, rising 393% and 156% in the last year, respectively. For transactions originating in India when comparing these same periods, this rate rose 54% for gaming and nearly 270% for travel and leisure.
The industries monitored worldwide include gambling, gaming, financial services, healthcare, insurance, retail and travel & leisure. The conclusions are based on intelligence from billions of transactions and more than 40,000 websites and apps with traffic coming from countries across the globe, including India.
Global financial services online fraud attempt rates had risen 149% when comparing the first four months of calendar 2021 and the last four months of 2020.
However, when comparing Q2 2021 and Q2 2020, the rate of suspected online financial services fraud attempts have still risen globally, but at a much lower rate of 18.8% globally. When comparing those two periods for transactions coming from India, that rate has declined by more than 15%.
TransUnion measures the rate of suspected or risky digital transaction attempts based on those that TransUnion customers receiving TruValidate services have either denied or reviewed due to fraudulent indicators compared to all transactions it assessed for fraud.
“It is quite common for fraudsters to shift their focus every few months from one industry to another,” said Shai Cohen, senior VP of global fraud solutions at TransUnion. “Fraudsters tend to seek out industries that may be seeing immense growth in transactions. This quarter, as countries began to open up more from their Covid lockdowns and travel and other leisure activities became more mainstream, fraudsters clearly made this industry a top target.”