Juniper: $130 Billion in Mobile Payments Card-Not-Present Fraud Upcoming

If you’ve ever been on the bad end of charges you didn’t make or purchases you didn’t intend to happen on Amazon or anywhere else, then you’ve run into card-not-present fraud. Sometimes it’s easily solved, and sometimes it ruins lives. But it’s on the rise, and a new report from Juniper Research says that there will be a lot more of it before too much longer.

By 2023, Juniper estimates, card-not-present fraud will account for $130 billion worth of losses. The good news is that that won’t be an annual figure, but rather, the cumulative loss for the entire industry in the time between 2018 and 2023. The biggest problem contributing to these massive numbers is that online merchants are mainly focused on addressing fraud at the point of sale.

Digital payment firms will land a hefty share of this, paying $9.6 billion in 2023 by themselves, but they won’t be the only one. Financial institutions and payment service providers will see the biggest growth throughout the period analyzed.

It’s easy to forget that stopping fraud is stopping fraud, but more fraud might be stopped if there were attention paid to fraud before the point of sale as well. Using a layered system, the report’s author Steffen Sorrell notes, would not only help address fraud, but it would also help work against false positive reports that can get in the way of the customer’s experience.

The less fraud there is in the system, the more likely that customers will put that system to use. We’ve already seen it with online shopping in general back when it got started, and we’ve seen it in mobile payments, too. Plus, it’s important to note that we’re talking about $130 billion over five years; the online shopping figures for just the 2018 holiday season were expected to be around $600 billion.

Fraud isn’t a big problem right now; the numbers make that clear. But any fraud is fraud that must be removed from the system as we move toward a goal of a fraud-free shopping experience. We may never get there, but like anything else, we must work at it as though it were possible. It just might be, after all.