Most Surprising Fraud Scams and What to Expect in 2024

Fraudsters are fickle. What’s new is old in the world of cybercrime, with fraudsters often just repackaging up an old attack with a new bow. But it is for this very reason that it is so difficult to predict the next move they’ll make.  

Recently, we reached out to a team of industry experts and practitioners to get their perspective on one question: what do you expect to see in 2024? Some of the answers were quite unexpected.  

So, here is what the experts expect to see about the 2024 fraud forecast: 

Jonathan Frost, Former Director of the UK National Fraud and Cybercrime Reporting Centre: 

I expect to see friction within the UK's domestic real-time payments system increase in anticipation of mandatory reimbursement [for APP scams] in late 2024. I suspect this will precipitate a shift back to card-based scams and the use of self-service international payment channels.  

Tim Dalgleish, Vice President of Global Advisory, BioCatch: 

Impersonation scams are going to grow off an already high base. Deep fakes (voice, face, etc) are going to make these impersonation scams a lot more convincing. Criminals are already having great success with simple messaging scams (e.g. Hi Mum, I’ve lost my phone), so migrating those to an (almost) perfect representation of the trusted person is only going to increase conversion rates on scam attempts. Aside from that, I also expect cash out via card-based channels to increase. 

Al Pascual, Cybercrime Expert, Founder, Inventor and Advisor, Stealth: 

I'm anticipating that the research capabilities of Large Language Models trained on, and with access to the open web, will turbocharge intelligence gathering for criminals. If their success in manipulating (or impersonating) someone is predicated on information, what better tool is there? And there's nothing to be done about it. The developers of these tools can't prevent these types of inquiries because they are so similar to legitimate use cases.   

Neira Jones, International Advisor and Expert – Fraud, Cybersecurity & Payments, Author of Understanding Payments: A Whistle-Stop Tour into What You Thought You Knew (February 2024): 
Given the increase of popularity in decentralised payments, and particularly crypto assets, the market is such that comparative transaction volumes are becoming more interesting to fraudsters. Fraud targeting DeFi services will increase, as well as value exchange services providing fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat transactions. The current lack of regulations in this space is advantageous to criminals. 

Ken Palla, Former Director of Fraud Strategy at Union Bank: 

I expect consumer financial scams to grow in 2024. The scammers have gotten so good, and we are not really seeing voice AI and video Gen AI yet in a scalable way. We have not found a good way to meaningfully educate consumers on the myriad of effective consumer financial scams. Plus, most financial institutions have not put enough effort in to identify/alert on these scams in real time and eliminate the money mule accounts necessary to facilitate the movement of money. Regulators need to mandate meaningful controls on both scams and money mules and carry a big stick. 

Diego Baldin, Solutions Engineer, Latin America, BioCatch: 

I expect to see an increase in the use of deepfakes to open mule accounts. Many banks have adopted facial biometrics to strengthen the security of the onboarding processes. This has effectively made the process safer, but in turn has encouraged the use of new techniques and technologies to circumvent these protection mechanisms. Deepfake technology to prove liveness is probably the most notable and will be one of the biggest challenges for financial institutions in the coming year. 

It was reported in October that fraudsters were responsible for nearly 1.4m cases of fraud in the UK during the first half of 2023. That’s one every 12 seconds. Overall, criminals stole £580m in the first six months of the year and it has been suggested that households are set to lose more than £1bn to fraudsters during 2023. This will only increase in 2024 without action. 

It's clear to see fraudsters aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Financial institutions need to remain vigilant and use technologies and expertise to try and fight the continued rise in sophisticated scammers. We don’t know what will happen in 2024, but these experts have a pretty good inkling.