Nearly one-quarter of all digital interactions (22.9 percent) in 2020 were fraud attempts, according to research from Arkose Labs. The Bay Area antifraud technology provider identified 4.4 billion fraud attacks around the world last year, more than 1.3 billion originating in the U.S. Considered regionally, however, Europe accounted for the most attacks (37 percent), followed by Asia (30 percent) and then North America.
Arkose’s Q1 2020 Fraud and Abuse Report noted that the pandemic, which caused a sharp rise in unemployment, resulted in a surge in human-driven attacks (as opposed to scripted attacks via bots). The report found human-driven attacks now account for 11 percent of fraud. Many of these attacks are carried out by poorly paid teams of people in “human sweatshops” that can avid bot-detection technology. While human attacks did rise significantly, according to Arkose Labs, the overall number of bot attacks remained high (3.9 billion, compared to 470 million human-driven attacks).
The report also found cross-device attacks growing, as fraudsters increasingly leverage gaming consoles, smart TVs and digital home assistants. Mobile devices and desktops, however, still see the most attacks.
Credential stuffing attacks topped Arkose’s list of most common types of fraud attack followed by fake account registrations, payment fraud, in-game abuse and web scraping.
