Annual spikes in consumer spend are tailed by increased digital risk and vulnerability. It’s tradition for fraud actors to target known periods of high transaction volumes and values, relying on these fluctuations to obscure payment fraud and account takeover attempts. True to form, Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2024 was ripe for risk: compared to 2023, when total transactions and events across the Sift network reached 795.7 million, this year’s volumes rose around 8% to 857.8 million.
Convenience & Travel Stay Caught in the Crosshairs
Markets like Food & Delivery and Travel are particularly vulnerable to fraud during high-traffic shopping periods. Users expect urgency from platforms oriented around instant gratification and real-time reservation confirmation, leading businesses to prioritize speed of fulfillment, forgo friction, and bypass manual review. The pace is ideal for fraud actors to attack at both login and transaction, drain data and rewards points, or commit promo abuse.
This year, several industries saw a spike in Black Friday fraud. But Travel/Transportation stood out as an emerging target for both account and payment fraud, with a 6.67% overall transaction block rate and an attempted ATO attack rate (% of blocked/failed login attempts out of all logins) of 2.08%—27% and 144% higher than YTD rates, respectively. For Online Travel Agencies, the total Black Friday Week block rate hit 4.18%, with 11/25 showing the highest daily spike for the period at 4.79%.
The travel space has been subject to snowballing fraud for half a decade, leading industry monoliths like Alaska Airlines and Hertz to adopt more powerful, robust fraud prevention solutions with Sift for year-round protection. Beyond Black Friday, the proof of the need is clear in the data: findings from FIBR, our Fraud Industry Benchmarking Resource, show travel to have the highest payment fraud attack rate (5.2%) across all industries we protect, making seasonal surges and changing risk even more challenging to face.
In every market, fraudsters are prioritizing attacks at the point of login. For businesses looking to strengthen risk operations in 2025, it will be important to leverage deep, identity-level data and insights, adapt to industry patterns, and have the ability to accurately detect and stop bot attacks, bulk purchase attempts, IP proxy threats, and automated ATO at scale.
A Season of ATO Foreshadows High Disputes
Ballooning account takeover attacks during the holiday season typically correspond to increasing disputes as the first quarter of the next year unfolds. This can happen during other annual changes in consumer spend too—summer comes with more frequent travel, events, and an uptick in retail shopping, promotions, and overall spend. In Q3 2022, dispute rates rose 35% from Q1 2022, with average values up 16% year-over-year, hovering around $193 per chargeback.
Fraudsters continue to focus on E-Commerce, where Retail’s Black Friday Week ATO attack rate doubled year-over-year, jumping from 2.29% to 4.53%. Businesses should prepare now for a spike in disputes following the 2024 holiday season, as consumers report fraudulent transactions—real or otherwise—and seek to recover lost (or hastily spent) funds.
It’s an investment in longevity for businesses to adopt solutions that combine device fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and AI/ML modeling. A holistic fraud approach can help flag suspicious activities like credential stuffing or account takeovers early.
Digital Trust as a Core Strategic Advantage
Digital trust is currency online, and a necessary ingredient for customer loyalty and expansion into broader markets. Trusted businesses inherently spend less to acquire, retain, and manage customers over time compared to less trusted competitors. Confident buyers require fewer checks and balances before engaging with a brand, need less product support, and are more likely to forgive challenges or missed expectations. This ultimately reduces friction across all touchpoints and slashes costs in areas like customer success, refunds, chargebacks, and even marketing—finally, a good reputation amongst consumers organically fuels adoption and loyalty.
Future-Forward Fraud Prevention
Solutions like Sift’s AI-powered fraud platform provide vital protection against seasonal volatility, turning consumer trust into lasting growth for digital businesses. Custom and global models help predict and prevent ATO and payment fraud with surgical precision: with an average ATO attack rate of 0.1% across our global data network of 1T annual events, we’ve helped customers like Rently and Carousell drop overall account takeover rates by 65%, eliminate manual review hours, and prevent hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraud losses each year. One global crypto exchange leveraged Sift to achieve significant stabilization in acceptance rates and unlock $19 million in new revenue in just one quarter.
Innovations like Sift’s RiskWatch deliver automated, adaptive risk decisioning that enhances the stability and accuracy of any provider’s fraud prevention efforts. This patent-pending innovation allows fraud teams to set target block rates that automatically adjust in response to changes in user behavior, fraud attacks, or other significant shifts, helping maintain consistent protection without the need for constant human intervention.
During dynamic periods or targeted fraud attacks—like high-velocity ATO during Black Friday weekend—RiskWatch quickly adjusts to maintain stable block rates, ensuring that legitimate users are not met with unnecessary friction, while fraud actors are immediately surfaced and stopped.
See how Sift can deliver unprecedented protection all year round, and compare more industry fraud data with FIBR, our Fraud Industry Benchmarking Resource.
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