Banking Scams Up 65% Globally in Past Year
Prices go up. Population goes up. And to complete this unhappy trinity, banking scams go up.
A new report from BioCatch, a behavioral biometrics company specializing in financial crime prevention, reveals a dramatic global surge in scams — up 65% over the past year.
Drawing data from financial institutions serving nearly 350 million consumers across five continents, the report highlights explosive growth in multiple scam types. Voice phishing (vishing) attempts doubled, romance scams rose by 63%, and investment scams climbed 42%. Meanwhile, SMS-based phishing skyrocketed — increasing tenfold year over year.
“While these numbers are staggering, they probably won’t surprise anyone,” BioCatch Director of Global Fraud Intelligence Tom Peacock said. “Fraud and anti-money laundering team leaders at the world’s largest banks fight through this scamming onslaught every single day, while the rest of us have undoubtedly noticed a marked surge in scammy text messages, emails, phone calls, and social posts.”
The exploited
According to the report, purchase scams remain the most common form of fraud globally, with a 14% increase in attempts this year.
The Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimates that consumers collectively lose more than $1 trillion annually to scams — a figure that continues to rise. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of the Treasury attributed much of the wave of scams to organized criminal operations.
“The financial system is being exploited to exploit people,” said Ian Mitchell, Founder of The Knoble. “These crimes take many forms: Generational wealth stolen through scams, people enslaved in scam centers, images of exploited children bought and sold online, money moved across the world to fund other heinous crimes. The reality is that organized criminal activity is not only stealing money. In some cases, it’s also stealing lives.”
“These aren’t backroom operations or something happening in the shadows,” Operation Shamrock Founder Erin West said. “Entire cities are now dedicated to scams, operating openly, protected, and expanding. They’re boomtowns, but instead of producing goods, their industry is fraud.”
Despite the grim findings, there is one bright spot: BioCatch customers reported a 15% decline in impersonation scams, which the company attributes to wider adoption of behavioral intelligence tools. In July, BioCatch launched Scams360, a platform designed to help banks detect and prevent complex social engineering schemes such as romance, investment, and business email compromise scams. We’ll let them have their sales pitch as they provided the useful data.
The report, titled “2025 Global Scams: Using behavioral and device intelligence to shine a light on social engineering scams,” also includes a case study from a European bank. It details how seemingly ordinary transactions can expose the devastating personal toll of scams — in one case, involving a mother undergoing cancer treatment and her daughter managing her finances.
Cyberattacks are on the rise in the UK, according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the nation’s technical authority for cybersecurity.
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