UK card-fraud losses increased to £594.9m in 2025 as card-not-present fraud rose, even while losses linked to identity fraud and lost or stolen cards declined.
The figures appear in FICO‘s 2025 European Fraud Map and are drawn from underlying UK Finance data.
Total losses on UK-issued cards increased slightly from £592.5m in 2024 and remained below the £620.6m recorded in 2019.
Card-not-present fraud — covering transactions in which the physical card is not presented to a merchant — increased from £412.5m to £423.5m.
Identity-fraud losses moved in the opposite direction, falling 12% from £61.5m to £54m. Losses associated with lost or stolen cards also declined, from £111.7m to £109.8m.
Across Europe, FICO reported total card-fraud losses of €1.69bn, with several countries recording increases considerably larger than the UK’s movement.
Sarah Cassidy, senior fraud consultant at FICO in EMEA, said: “The biggest threat to the UK financial services ecosystem is the relentless use of social engineering tactics.”
The warning reflects an important shift in fraud tactics. Banks and payment businesses have invested heavily in authentication, transaction monitoring, and card security, making some forms of direct technical compromise harder.
Criminals can instead target the customer, persuading people to disclose passwords, one-time passcodes, card information, or other details that allow a fraudulent transaction to appear legitimate to automated systems.
FICO highlighted cases where consumers are persuaded to share one-time passwords, enabling cards to be linked to devices or digital wallets controlled by fraudsters.
Once a token has been created using valid customer credentials, later activity may be harder to distinguish from authorised spending.
That makes prevention increasingly dependent on analysing the full customer journey rather than assessing each payment in isolation.
Banks can combine transaction patterns with device signals, account behaviour, customer contact, and other indicators to identify activity that appears plausible individually but becomes unusual when viewed across several data points.
Artificial intelligence is becoming more prominent on both sides of that contest. Financial institutions use machine learning to detect anomalies across enormous transaction volumes, while criminals can use generative systems to produce more convincing messages, impersonation attempts, synthetic identities, and scripts for social engineering.
The decline in identity-fraud losses suggests controls in that category have had some effect despite rapid improvements in technology capable of producing synthetic documents and identities.
FICO also cautioned that the number of fraud cases continues to rise. Loss totals therefore provide only one measure of the pressure facing financial institutions.
Fraud controls can also affect customer experience. Overly aggressive systems can block legitimate spending, interrupt account access, and increase pressure on contact centres.
The operational objective is not simply to stop more transactions, but to improve the accuracy with which suspicious behaviour is identified so legitimate customers can continue transacting with minimal friction.
Retailers and other businesses have direct exposure as well. Card-not-present fraud remains closely associated with ecommerce, where merchants have to balance authentication, chargebacks, fulfilment, and conversion.
Additional verification can reduce fraud but may also increase checkout abandonment, prompting payment businesses to invest in risk tools operating in the background rather than repeatedly requiring customers to complete manual checks.
The UK figures remain below the 2019 peak, but an annual loss approaching £600m is still substantial. The changing composition of losses is equally important.
As older fraud routes become more difficult, criminals can move towards channels where human behaviour can be manipulated or where digital commerce creates greater distance between the cardholder, merchant, and payment instrument.
Fraud prevention is therefore increasingly a combined challenge spanning cybersecurity, identity, customer communication, payments, and real-time behavioural analysis. The latest figures show progress in several categories, but continued growth in card-not-present losses indicates that fraud pressure is changing form rather than disappearing.
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