Digital fraud continues to grow. In 2025, 7.1% of attempted transactions involving consumers in India were suspected to be digital fraud, almost double the global rate. While account creation remains the highest risk stage in the digital consumer lifecycle globally, digital fraud risk in India is most elevated during account login, according to TransUnion's ‘Top Fraud Trends Report’.
Globally, account creation remains the highest-risk stage across the digital consumer lifecycle, with 8.3% of those transaction attempts suspected to be fraudulent in 2025. In India, however, fraud risk was most concentrated during account login (3.9%) last year, reflecting growing attempts to compromise legitimate user credentials, followed by account creation (3.1%) and financial transactions (1.2%). This pattern suggests attackers are increasingly targeting existing accounts using compromised credentials.
“Fraudsters are moving upstream,” said Anurag Anand, head of fraud solutions, TransUnion India Data Analytics Solutions (INDAS). “They increasingly exploit vulnerabilities at account creation and login, concealing identity manipulation until losses mount. These methods enable criminals to evade rules-based systems built for a different threat environment. To keep pace, businesses need intelligence-driven, proactive solutions to detect sophisticated identity risks at onboarding,” he said.
Fraudsters weaponise consumer trust and emerging technologies
Fraud exposure varies significantly by industry, with attackers targeting sectors that combine high transaction volumes with frequent digital engagement. For transactions involving consumers in India, logistics recorded the highest suspected digital fraud rate in 2025 at 16.3%, followed by telecommunications (14.7%) and insurance (11.5%).
“These sectors often rely on real-time interactions, distributed networks and high-frequency transactions, creating opportunities for fraudsters to exploit gaps in identity verification and authentication,” TransUnion India said. These findings are from the TransUnion H1 2026 ‘Top Fraud Trends Report’, which highlights a shift toward identity-driven fraud and increasingly sophisticated attack methods.
“Fraudsters are weaponising both consumer trust and emerging technologies,” said Natarajan Ramani, head of TransUnion INDAS. “As the scale and sophistication of fraudulent operations continue to grow, the threat landscape is evolving faster than ever,” he said.
“Addressing this requires a new generation of identity-centric defences that combine advanced analytics, adaptive authentication and multi-layered fraud detection. Organisations must match fraudsters’ technological innovation to stay ahead of rapidly changing schemes,” Ramani stated.
