The Fastest-Growing Fraud in 2026 Passes Every Check You Have

The fastest-growing fraud in 2026 passes every check you have.

Verified account. Recognized device. Behavior that clears every checkpoint. Your system says yes, and it should have said no.

Adyen’s 2026 Fraud Report, titled “Fraud’s identity crisis,” is built on $1.6 trillion in platform data and a survey of 1,000 US enterprise merchants. Its core finding: “The fraud growing fastest today comes from verified accounts, recognized devices, behavior that clears every checkpoint.”

The Numbers That Matter

• About 70% of merchants expect fraud to limit their revenue growth.
• 50% report rising false declines.

Put those together and the picture is uncomfortable. Merchants are losing to fraud they cannot see and to good customers they are wrongly turning away. The defense is now the cost.

What “Fraud That Passes Every Check” Looks Like

Traditional fraud controls ask a few questions at the moment of checkout: is this account verified, is this a known device, does the behavior look normal? The fraud growing fastest answers yes to all of them.

• Account takeover: a fraudster gains access to a real customer’s account and buys as that customer.
• Scams and social engineering: the real customer is manipulated into making the payment themselves.
• Friendly fraud: a real customer makes a real purchase and later disputes it. I cover the dispute side in What Is a Chargeback?
• Synthetic and mule accounts: accounts built slowly to look legitimate before they are used.

My Take After 15 Years in Payments

The point-in-time check is dead

You cannot verify identity once and assume it holds. Trust is a signal that moves across sessions, devices and time, not a box you tick at checkout. A customer who logged in normally can still have their session hijacked. A device that was trusted last month can be compromised this month.

Tightening controls is no longer “safe”

Every rule you add to stop fraud quietly declines good customers. The cost has moved from prevented loss to lost lifetime value, and most teams still do not measure that side. I explain the difference in Fraud Declines vs. No-Fraud Declines.

Your KPI is the problem

Fraud teams are scored on fraud rate, so they block more. Nobody owns the revenue that was turned away. Until false declines sit on the same dashboard as fraud, teams will keep optimizing the wrong number.

The edge is precision, not aggression

The merchants pulling ahead are not blocking the most. They are approving the right customers fastest. That is an authorization problem as much as a fraud problem.

What a Modern Setup Looks Like

1. Continuous risk scoring across login, account changes, checkout and post-purchase, not only at payment.
2. Signals on account changes: new email, new shipping address, new payment method and password reset, especially in combination.
3. A decisioning layer that can combine rules, models and manual review. See What Is a Risk Decisioning Platform?
4. Shared metrics for fraud rate, false decline rate, approval rate and customer lifetime value.
5. Controlled experiments to test whether a rule change moves fraud, approvals or both.

On the approval side, my authorization rate optimization guide covers how to measure the trade-off.

A Simple Test

If you cut your decline rate by one point tomorrow, do you know whether fraud would move? If you cannot answer that, you are flying blind on the most important trade-off in payments.

Source: Adyen, 2026 Fraud Report, Fraud’s identity crisis (May 2026).

Adyen 2026 Fraud Report: Key Takeaways

• The fraud report finds that the fastest-growing fraud passes identity checks.
• According to the fraud report, about 70% of merchants expect fraud to limit growth and 50% see rising false declines.
• The lesson from the fraud report: measure false declines next to fraud rate.

FAQ

What does the Adyen 2026 Fraud Report say?

Titled Fraud’s identity crisis and based on $1.6 trillion in platform data and a survey of 1,000 US enterprise merchants, it finds that the fastest-growing fraud comes from verified accounts, recognized devices and behavior that clears every checkpoint.

What is account takeover fraud?

Account takeover is when a fraudster gains control of a legitimate customer’s account, then transacts as that customer. Because the account, and sometimes the device, are genuine, traditional checks often approve it.

How do merchants balance fraud prevention and false declines?

By putting fraud rate and false declines on the same dashboard, using continuous risk signals rather than one-time checks, and making decisions based on the value of approving good customers as well as the cost of fraud.

A shorter version of this analysis was first published on LinkedIn on May 21, 2026.

Related Reading

• Fraud Declines vs. No-Fraud Declines
• What Is a Risk Decisioning Platform? Workflow, AI, and Design Principles
• What Is a Chargeback and How Can Merchants Prevent It?
• Authorization Rate Optimization: A Payments PM’s Complete Guide