Adyen Report: Fraud's Identity Crisis

Adyen, the global financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, today published its 2026 fraud report, Fraud’s Identity Crisis, which revealed that fraud losses associated with fraudulent chargebacks on Adyen’s global platform decreased 20% in 2025, but the headline obscures a dangerous trend. According to the report, the average value of a fraudulent dispute dropped 23% over the same period, signaling that instead of only being concentrated in a small number of high-value transactions, fraud has expanded to include lower-value activity as it’s become easier to scale. Fraud isn’t retreating, it’s redistributing, and global ecommerce fraud is on track to exceed $100 billion by 2029, up from $44 billion in 2024.

The report, which combines data from Adyen’s global financial technology platform with a survey of enterprise businesses, finds that automation and AI have lowered the barrier to entry for bad actors, enabling tactics to be scripted, tested, and shared across closed networks. Fake and bot accounts are now the second most-encountered fraud type globally, reported by 42% of enterprises.

“Global ecommerce fraud is on a trajectory to exceed $100 billion by 2029, driven by a fundamental shift in how bad actors operate. We are seeing a move away from high-value external attacks toward high-frequency abuse within trusted environments,” said Trevor Nies, Global Head of Digital at Adyen. “This will only accelerate with agentic commerce. AI agents industrialize the edge cases businesses already struggle to contain, and they do it at scale. This is where Adyen’s Dynamic Identification comes in. Success in this new era requires a transition from static defenses to sophisticated, dynamic trust-scoring that can validate autonomous intent at scale.” 

Risk has moved inside trusted environments

The risk no longer primarily comes from strangers forcing their way in. It comes from recognized customers, authenticated accounts, and verified devices or first-party fraud. First-party fraud is now the most commonly reported type of fraud (44%), closely followed by fake accounts and identity abuse (42%) and policy or promotion abuse (40%). More traditional threats, such as stolen cards and account takeovers, were reported by 36% of businesses surveyed.

Adyen platform data shows that just 3% of identities account for 50% of all refund value, while 5% of identities drive 41% of fraud incidents and 58% of fraud value. The cost of handling a single first-party misuse dispute has climbed to $82, up from $74 in 2024.

The pattern is especially visible during high-volume shopping moments, when flash discounts, compressed return windows, and loyalty incentives give a small fraction of abusive customers more surface area to operate. The events themselves don’t create the problem, but they accelerate it, compressing the abuse cycle and making it harder for businesses to distinguish incentive-driven shoppers: from serial policy abusers in real time.

False declines are emerging as the bigger revenue threat

For most enterprise merchants, the larger commercial risk is no longer missed fraud, it’s blocking good customers. Fifty percent of businesses in Adyen’s survey report rising false declines, and static controls are blocking up to 10% of legitimate customers at checkout. Fifty-eight percent report rising manual review costs, which highlights the additional costs of fraud.

The cost compounds. Nearly 70% of businesses expect fraud and abuse to limit revenue growth over the next 12 to 24 months, rising to 79% in travel and hospitality and 81% in digital goods and gaming. The framing of the function itself is shifting in response: 48% of businesses now view fraud management as a balance between loss prevention and growth, while 39% see it primarily as a growth-enabling function. Only 3.2% report making no fraud-related tradeoffs in the past year.

“Fraud management used to be about keeping bad actors out, but the threat has now moved inside into trusted accounts, verified identities, and even autonomous agents,” said Brigette Korney, Global Head of Performance Optimization at Adyen. “The businesses that act now will have a significant advantage over those that wait and essentially underwrite the risks themselves.”

Agentic commerce is opening the next frontier

The fraud surface is also expanding into autonomous commerce. With AI agents projected to influence between 5 and 20% of payment volume within five years, 30% of merchants already identify AI-platform trust scoring as the most critical new signal needed to manage the transition. Agentic commerce doesn’t create a new category of fraud, it industrializes the edge cases businesses already struggle to contain, extending risk beyond checkout into promotions, returns, and identity.

The gap between consumer adoption and fraud readiness is widening. Traditional fraud detection was built around human uncertainty, the browsing patterns and hesitations that characterize how real people shop. Autonomous agents don’t hesitate. That makes them nearly indistinguishable from malicious ones, and fraud detection built around human behavior has no answer for that yet.  

The report combines transaction data from Adyen’s global platform with survey responses from enterprise merchants across retail, travel and hospitality, digital goods, gaming, and other sectors. The full report is available here.

Methodology

This report is based on two primary data sources: (1) transaction data from the Adyen platform covering the full year 2025, representing approximately US$1.6T in processed global payment volume, and (2) a survey of 1,000 US-based enterprise business decision makers between 27.02.2026 - 06.03.2026. Survey respondents were recruited via CensusWide, and responses are self-reported. In this report, “Adyen platform data” refers to aggregated and anonymized transaction data processed through the Adyen platform, while “Adyen survey data” refers to responses collected from the aforementioned merchant survey.

About Adyen

Adyen (AMS: ADYEN) is the financial technology platform of choice for leading companies. By providing end-to-end payments capabilities, data-driven insights, and financial products in a single global solution, Adyen helps businesses achieve their ambitions faster. With offices around the world, Adyen works with the likes of Meta, Uber, H&M, eBay, and Microsoft.