Greg Witten
Fraud continues to be a problem in the payments world—but there may be reason to hope. Recent trends show that the battlefield is levelling: merchants might finally have the tools and technologies they need to start fighting more types of fraud effectively. Staying informed about different types of fraud and how they are affecting merchants can help give you the confidence to react to changes quickly.
The latest friendly fraud trends
Recent data from the 2025 MRC Payments and Fraud Report has shown significant declines in first-party misuse attacks. Also called friendly fraud, this is a type of fraud in which consumers dispute a legitimate purchase, either because they do not recognize it, have forgotten that they authorized it, or are attempting to deliberately abuse the payment system.
Real-time payments (RTP) fraud has emerged as the second most widespread type of fraud attack, affecting 45% of merchants globally. Alongside RTP fraud, other prevalent types of fraud attacks include refund or policy abuse, phishing/pharming/whaling, and card testing. Data show that these types of fraud have impacted between 33% and 47% of merchants over the past year.1
The fraud battlefield is starting to level
Despite these challenges, we have seen improvements in several fraud metrics, as measured in our recent fraud report. That report illustrates that order rejection rates have dropped from 5.8% to 5.0% and fraud rates by order have dropped from 3.4% to 3.0%, likely due to better fraud management efforts by merchants.
Improvements like AI tools, increased automation, and better data are some of the recent innovations that can help merchants protect themselves. AI-powered fraud detection can leverage large amounts of payments data to learn what genuine and fraudulent payment behavior looks like, continually improving its fraud detection capabilities. By investing in these types of fraud management tools and technologies, you can start to significantly decrease your fraud rates.
More on this year’s fraud trends
For a deeper dive on friendly fraud and other fraud trends that have emerged this year, read the 2025 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report. There’s lots of great information to help you start improving your defenses against friendly fraud today!
All data can be found in 2025 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report | Verifi