At CO-OP’s recent FraudBuzz webinar, participants identified person-to-person (P2P) fraud as the #1 payment fraud trend to watch. And it’s no wonder. With the popularity of easy-to-use, touchless payments taking off during the pandemic, opportunistic criminals are capitalizing on this trend.

P2P payments increased substantially during the pandemic, with Venmo processing $159 billion in transactions in 2020, an increase of 59% over the prior year. Zelle^®, with the added advantage of being embedded into many popular credit union and banks’ mobile banking apps, processed a record $307 billion, representing 58% growth in year-over-year transaction volume.

The result? A dramatic rise in P2P-related fraud, as evidenced by the recent growth in account takeover (ATO) activity, which has increased by 40% from 2019 to 2020, while attacks on mobile devices have increased by 48% year over year.

 

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