Transaction volume across the Sift Global Data Network grew 15.2% from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026, and the topline fraud numbers improved alongside it. Global payment fraud block rates fell and account takeover (ATO) rates dropped 28% year over year. For teams watching aggregate trends, the picture looks encouraging.
Averages describe a fraud landscape getting easier to manage, but what the data actually shows is fraud’s getting harder to see. Alongside these drops, the data shows coordinated fraud rings spanning 90+ businesses, with Internet & Software posting its highest ATO rate in the past year, and online gambling payment fraud rising 383%.
Fraud Rings Reveal the Limits of Isolated Detection
The clearest sign that fraud is evolving lies in the network patterns. Sift’s Mean Global Linkage metric measures whether a user’s activity is isolated or tied to a broader network pattern. Users associated with fraudulent chargebacks scored 15.8x higher than clean users, a gap that only becomes visible when you look beyond the individual transaction. The pattern only becomes visible when accounts, devices, payment instruments, and transaction histories are evaluated together.
For example, a loyalty program fraud ring spanning 90+ businesses combined compromised accounts with newly created ones, generating nearly 13,000 attempted transactions at an average value of $223 with mixed risk signals throughout. In another example, a card-testing ring in food delivery kept average order value at $4.06 across 390 transactions, deliberately below common detection thresholds. While chargebacks only appeared at one merchant, the stolen cards had been used across five different businesses. In both cases, blunt rules would have failed. A blanket block would have skyrocketed false positives and create a bad user experience, while a narrow rule targeting one merchant would miss the ring entirely.
Account Takeover Concentrates Where It Hurts Most
Global ATO block rates fell 28% year over year, but the exception matters more than the trend. Internet & Software was the only tracked vertical to get worse, rising 6% overall, the highest single-quarter industry reading in the network. And 22% of consumers reported experiencing account takeover in the past year, a reminder that aggregate improvement doesn’t resolve the customer trust problem.
Attackers keep coming because accounts hold value across every digital category, from banking and social media to food delivery, gaming, and subscriptions. Global 2FA rates held essentially flat year over year, but authentication alone was never going to be enough. More than 65% of breached accounts are estimated to have had MFA enabled at compromise. Stronger ATO defense depends on pairing login controls with behavioral signals, account-change monitoring, and downstream transaction analysis.
Payment Fraud Is Shifting Across Industries and Methods
Overall payment fraud block rates improved, but the gains were uneven. Travel & Ticketing and Finance & Fintech posted the sharpest declines while Food & Delivery and Online Gambling moved in the opposite direction, rising 19% and 383% respectively.
Payment method matters as much as industry. Cryptocurrency carried the highest payment fraud attack rate at 9.46%, followed by Electronic Fund Transfer at 8.36% and Credit/Debit Card at 4.48%. In-app Purchase was lowest at 0.87%. That range is wide enough that uniform controls will underperform at every point on the spectrum, simultaneously too strict for low-risk methods and too lenient for high-risk ones.
Transaction value and false-positive costs show that the financial stakes of every fraud decision vary significantly by industry, and strategies need to reflect that. A $342 average order value in Internet & Software creates very different exposure than $14 in Food & Delivery, and a false positive in Digital Commerce costs $496 compared with $24 in Food & Delivery. Across categories, blocking the wrong transaction can cost more than the fraud it was trying to prevent.
Fraud Prevention Is Now a Retention Strategy
Fraud incidents are a brand risk too. In the past year, 26% of U.S. consumers experienced payment fraud and 22% experienced account takeover. At that scale, fraud prevention and customer retention are the same problem.
The retention data shows why response quality matters as much as detection speed. After an ATO incident, 54% of customers continued using the platform without hesitation. But 35% stayed with reduced trust, and 11% left permanently. After experiencing a fraudulent charge on their account, only 28% of customers continued without hesitation, 37% stayed with reduced trust, and 27% left for good. Another 8% said their decision depended entirely on how the company handled the incident.
Consumers consistently want speed, transparency, and proactive communication after experiencing fraud. Eighty-two percent said quick resolution would improve their perception of the company. Seventy-six percent said the same about proactive and transparent communication. The downside is equally clear: 46% said a lack of transparency would significantly worsen their view of the company, and 36% said the same about slow resolution.
For fraud and trust teams, that data points to a mandate that goes beyond detection. How a business detects, communicates, and resolves fraud incidents now directly shapes whether customers recover confidence or leave permanently. The teams that treat post-incident response as part of the fraud strategy are the ones most likely to protect both revenue and the customer relationships that sustain it.
For more insights into the latest fraud trends, read Sift’s Q2 2026 Digital Trust Index: The Fraud Economy Scales Up.
