Payment fraud is undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the pace of change is accelerating. According to Tieto Banktech, five key trends are reshaping the financial crime landscape.
Fraud gets personal
Perhaps the most striking development is how deeply personal fraud has become. Between 2024 and 2025, cases involving social manipulation rose by 33%, signalling not just growth in volume but a wholesale shift in method, it said.
Fraudsters are no longer relying on blunt, one-off attacks. Instead, they invest days or weeks building relationships with targets, mirroring their language and exploiting psychological vulnerabilities to steer victims towards harmful decisions.
Tieto Banktech head of financial crime prevention Gunnar Koren said, “To combat tomorrow’s fraud, understanding technology is no longer enough. As fraud now relies just as heavily on human judgement, we must equally understand human behaviour.”
AI blurs the line between real and fake
Running in parallel is the rapid rise of AI-powered deception. Sophisticated tools can now generate convincing deepfakes, including synthetic voices, fabricated video, and highly targeted written content, that even digitally native users struggle to question.
Koren said, “When AI can imitate both voices and faces, fraud becomes more convincing than ever before. This creates a fraud landscape that is increasingly difficult to navigate. Once again, understanding human behaviour becomes essential.”
Fake online shops go professional
The third trend concerns the rapid professionalisation of fraudulent e-commerce. Gone are the crude scam pages of years past. Today’s fake online shops are slick, commercially convincing operations closely integrated with digital advertising platforms. Fraudsters can spin up credible storefronts within hours, tweaking visuals and messaging with considerable agility to evade detection and target unsuspecting shoppers, Tieto explained.
Fraud crosses borders and fragments
Cross-border money movement is also emerging as a significant concern. Criminal networks are deliberately routing transactions across multiple jurisdictions and breaking payment flows into smaller, harder-to-trace sums. Both witting participants and unwitting individuals, recruited as money mules through financial pressure and emotional manipulation, are used to obscure the trail.
Koren said, “The fraud economy is becoming more professional and global, and therefore – unfortunately – much more adaptable. The harder it becomes to dismantle this infrastructure, the more crucial international cooperation between banks, authorities and technology players will be.”
Trust becomes the battleground
The fifth and perhaps most consequential trend is the erosion of trust in digital systems. Consumers are increasingly wary of how their data is used, yet simultaneously expect stronger protections in an ever more digital world. This tension creates a difficult balancing act: organisations must tighten security without making users feel surveilled.
Koren said, “Trust in digital systems is a foundation society cannot afford to lose – and fraudsters know this. Going forward, the focus must not only be on technology and the responsible use of data, but also on building and maintaining trust through transparency and dialogue.”
Why it matters
Taken together, these five trends are not isolated developments. They reinforce one another, creating a more psychologically sophisticated, globally dispersed and technologically enhanced threat environment.
Koren said, “The organisations that succeed in fraud prevention will be those able to view technology, behaviour, and collaboration as interconnected.”
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