UK Finance just released its 2025 Half-Year Report, which shows fraud losses continue to rise despite industry efforts. Criminals stole £629.3 million in the first half of 2025, a 3% increase from the same period in 2024.

While a 3% increase may not seem large, news of the increase comes a year after the UK implemented mandatory reimbursement for Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud. The latest UKF figures suggest those measures have yet to deliver meaningful results.

Meanwhile, the financial impact tells only half the story. Fraud also takes a heavy toll on victims. Many in the UK receive full or partial reimbursement, but reimbursement doesn’t erase the human cost of widespread fraud.

A government survey found that 86% of victims felt anger, 73% reported stress, and 63% reported anxiety. At the most serious end of the spectrum, 18% said they suffered depression, and 3% reported suicidal thoughts.

Let’s dive deeper into the findings.

The headline numbers

The following figures from the report cover the first half of 2025 and are compared with the same period in 2024.

• Total gross fraud losses £629.3 million, up 3%
• Total confirmed fraud cases: 2.09 million, up 17%
• Unauthorized fraud: £371.8 million, down 3%
• Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud: £257.5 million, up 12%
• Fraud prevented by the industry: £870 million, the equivalent of 70 pence saved in every one pound attempted

In the first half of 2025, that translates to every minute seeing:

• £2,300 of confirmed fraud losses (£2,394)
• £3,300 in attempted fraud stopped
• Eight people victimized

The figures highlight that fraud continues to evolve. APP is up by 12%, largely driven by investment fraud. These cases are low in volume but often involve large monetary losses and a significant time lag because the fraud only comes to light when victims try to realise their investment. However, the growth in remote purchase fraud reflects a change of tactics as criminals respond to improved controls in faster payments.

The growth of APP fraud

APP fraud remains the fastest-growing and most damaging fraud type. At £257.5 million, APP Fraud made up 41% of all fraud losses in the UK in the first half of 2025, up from 38% in the same period in 2024.

UK Finance data continues to highlight the central role that social media, online marketplaces, and search engines play in APP scams and enabling fraudsters to reach victims. In 2025, 66% of APP scams originated online. While significant, the share is down slightly from 71% in 2024, when most APP scams were traced to online sources.

Ultimately, despite government public awareness campaigns such as “Stop! Think Fraud” and the rollout of mandatory APP reimbursement rules in October 2024, criminals continue to exploit weak controls in the digital ecosystems of tech giants.

Unauthorized fraud: A story of prevention

More positively, unauthorized fraud figures in the first half of 2025 provide room for cautious optimism. Although losses remained high at £371.8million, the total was down 3% from the same period in 2024, while the number of prevented cases rose.

Using fraud prevention solutions such as those provided by BioCatch, Payment Service Providers (PSPs) blocked a massive £870 million in attempted fraud, the equivalent of stopping 70 pence of every £1 targeted.

The trend mirrors 2024, when UK Finance reported a record £725.6 million in unauthorized fraud prevented — a record now surpassed by 2025. Clearly, investments in behavioral biometrics are paying off. UK Finance does not provide institution-level data, but BioCatch’s own data suggests that institutions using advanced behavioral intelligence outperform those relying only on transaction monitoring. This likely applies to preventing both unauthorized and APP fraud.

What’s driving the increase in fraud?

The industry’s data highlights three main drivers of rising fraud.

• The human factor: Unlike card fraud, which depends on stealing payment details, APP scams rely on manipulating victims into taking action on the criminal’s behalf. From investment scams promising high returns to romance scams exploiting emotional trust, criminals are adapting their scripts faster than awareness campaigns can counter them.
• Remote and mobile channels under pressure: Data from 2024 showed a significant rise in remote purchase fraud, up 22% in cases, and mobile banking fraud, up 9% in value. These trends are to likely continue as fraudsters focus on tricking customers into bypassing strong customer authentication (SCA) for card-based remote purchases.
• Technology and regulation working, but not everywhere: The financial services sector has cut criminal gains to 30 pence in the pound, which stands in stark contrast to the relative inaction of major tech companies. With enforcement of the Online Safety Act’s provisions on paid fraudulent advertising delayed until 2027, a significant regulatory gap between the two sectors is likely to persist.

What needs to change?

Sadly, the UK Finance Half-Year Report suggests that while the industry is pushing back, criminals are pushing harder — and, for now, gaining ground. The challenge for PSPs is visibility. Ideally, they need insight into risk within their own domain, the receiving PSPs’ domain, and, critically, at the network level.

BioCatch customers in both Australia and Argentina already have that visibility with BioCatch Trust™, our real-time behavioral consortium successfully improving APP fraud detection. The Trust model provides sending institutions a three-dimensional perspective on risk: their customers' behavior, payment intent within the network, and, crucially, the risk profile of the receiving account — regardless of whether the PSP is a BioCatch customer.

In Australia, the Trust network now covers more than 85% of the country’s banked population. In its first 10 months, Trust Australia evaluated $500 billion in total payments and saved customers at member banks millions of dollars in potential losses.

National Australia Bank (NAB) has publicly reported success using these insights to dynamically create friction and block high-risk payments:

“In addition to the $48 million-plus in stopped and recovered scam payments, customers have also abandoned more than $195 million worth of payments in that same six-month period, after receiving a real-time payment alert,” said Chris Sheehan, who heads NAB’s Group Investigations and Fraud business unit, on the initial success of Trust.

ANZ, another major financial services company in Australia, has also publicly stated that Trust has improved its ability to protect customers from scams, noting collaboration is at the heart of tackling the scam problem:

“We’re seeing a measurable uplift in our ability to detect scams, particularly those that are more nuanced and harder to catch through traditional methods," said Shaq Johnson, ANZ’s head of customer protection.

Notably, the bank says the uplift in scam detection through Trust has not hurt customer experience, striking a better balance between security and convenience. One of its goals is to cut false positives, reducing interruptions or delays to legitimate transactions.

Trust’s demonstrated success in the Australian market shows the potential benefits of enhanced collaboration in the UK. With appropriate regulatory incentives, both the technology and the business case exist to address the negative trends identified in the UK Finance Half-Year Report. The UK finance sector must now work together to implement solutions that improve the detection of social engineering, mule activity, and the abuse of faster payments.