The news: Digital fraud fell but was still rampant during the Cyber 5 holiday weekend—4.2% of all attempted US ecommerce transactions were suspected to have been fraud between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, per TransUnion.

This was a decline from last year’s 5.8% despite increased ecommerce activity this year. In the US, online spending during Cyber Five jumped up 8.2% YoY to $41.1 billion, per Adobe Analytics. This was just shy of the $41.43 billion we forecast back in July.

The bigger picture: Thanks to improved fraud prevention, payment providers also blocked more fraudulent transactions this year.

• Visa proactively blocked 410% more suspected fraudulent transactions in the UK on Black Friday than it did the year prior.
• And across all of Cyber 5 weekend in the UK, Visa blocked 117% more transactions than it did in 2023. The payments network didn’t disclose the number of US transactions it stopped.

Over the past year, Visa leaned into AI to beef up its fraud protection, launching new features and acquiring Featurespace for a reported $935 million.

Our take: Investments in fraud solutions will be crucial for payment providers going forward as fraud persists across ecommerce.

But payment providers shouldn’t stop there. Going forward, they should also spend money on education campaigns to help their customers identify and stop scams: Consumer deception scams are on the rise given fraudsters have a harder time bypassing these more advanced AI-based solutions.

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