Card-Not-Present Fraud Losses to Exceed $7 Billion by 2020

PORTLAND, OR and BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - May 6, 2016) - iovation, the provider of device intelligence for authentication and fraud prevention, today announced the immediate availability of a report it and research and advisory firm Aite Group developed entitled "EMV: Issuance Trajectory and Impact on Account Takeover and CNP." The report calculated that card-not-present fraud -- fraudulent transactions where a credit card is not physically presented to a merchant -- will cost retailers and financial institutions $7.2 Billion in the United States by the end of 2020. The report also found that account takeover losses for financial institutions -- when a fraudster poses as a genuine customer, gains control of an account and then makes unauthorized transactions -- will increase from $644 million in 2015 to more than $1 billion by 2020 in the U.S.

iovation and Aite Group believe a big driver of this fraud will be the shift from consumers using traditional credit and debit cards with magnetic strips to EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) chipped cards. The report found that by the end of 2016, 81 percent of credit and 57 percent of debit cards in the U.S. will be EMV capable. The widespread adoption of EMV cards in the U.S. began in October 2015 when all merchants who refused to accommodate chip cards were legally forced to shoulder more of the financial burden of fraudulent transactions.

"In other countries that preceded the U.S. in widespread EMV adoption, there was a big increase in counterfeit fraud activity during the time period where people transitioned from stripe to chip cards," said Michael Thelander, product marketing manager at iovation. "We are seeing that exact scenario play out in the U.S. as criminals realize their window for perpetrating counterfeit card fraud is rapidly closing, so they are working through their vast piles of compromised cards."

The report found that as more merchants become EMV-capable, counterfeit fraud will fall from a high of $4.5 billion in 2016 to less than $1 billion in 2020. EMV is a computer chip on a credit or debit card. These chips contain embedded microprocessors that, unlike the more familiar magnetic stripe cards, transmit unique data with every transaction that makes card duplication extremely difficult.

"As the U.S. migration to EMV progresses, the combination of continued strong growth in e-commerce, ready availability of consumer data and credentials in the underweb, and disappearing counterfeit fraud opportunity will create a perfect storm that will result in a sharp rise in CNP fraud," said Julie Conroy, research director at Aite Group. Conroy went on to say, "CNP fraud is already on the rise, and the problem will get worse before it gets better. Financial institutions and merchants must invest in technologies that will help detect fraud, while at the same time maintaining a delightful user experience."

Methodology
To understand the current state and trajectory of the U.S. EMV migration, as well as the concurrent fraud shifts, Aite Group interviewed 16 large U.S. issuers, four issuing processors, and two payment networks of credit and debit cards between February and April 2016 to come to its conclusions. Collectively the interviewees represent 73 percent of the credit card issuing market and 69 percent of the debit card issuing market.

To read "EMV: Issuance Trajectory and Impact on Account Takeover and CNP," go to iovation.com/resources/reports/emv-issuance-trajectory-and-impact-on-account-takeover-and-cnp. For more background about the report, iovation and Aite will jointly host webinars on June 8 at 6am and 10am PDT. To register, go to iovation.com/news/events/eight-months-of-emv-early-fraud-shifts-and-trajectory.

About iovation
iovation protects online businesses and their end users against fraud and abuse, and identifies trustworthy customers through a combination of advanced device identification, shared device reputation, device-based authentication and real-time risk evaluation. More than 3,500 fraud managers representing global retail, financial services, insurance, social network, gaming and other companies leverage iovation's database of billions of Internet devices and the relationships between them to determine the level of risk associated with online transactions. The company's device reputation database is the world's largest, used to protect 15 million transactions and stop an average of 250,000 fraudulent activities every day. The world's foremost fraud experts share intelligence, cybercrime tips and online fraud prevention techniques in iovation's Fraud Force Community, an exclusive virtual crime-fighting network. For more information, visit iovation.com.