The new economics of fraud: Cheaper, faster, more convincing

The Visa Spring 2026 biannual threat report highlights a rise in AI-enabled scams and social-engineering-driven payment fraud—nearly $1 billion in scam activity detected in H2 2025—while payments-level defenses (tokenization, authentication, network detection) have reduced some fraud types. Attackers are shifting toward exploiting people and third-party dependencies using AI-generated content and voice deepfakes, increasing the speed and scale of campaigns; ransomware incidents rose 26% in the same period even as ransom payments and average payouts declined, prompting a focus on recovery, backups, and cross-partner coordination.