Dive Brief:
- Identity theft is the top concern of consumers who are shopping online. The credit monitoring company Experian polled 2,000 consumers and found that 84% said they worry about identity theft, a 20 percentage point increase from a 2023 survey, according to an Aug. 21 report on the results.
- The number of consumers who worry their credit card information will be stolen also spiked between 2024 and 2023. The poll showed that 80% of consumers said they worry about bad actors acquiring their card information, a jump of 19 percentage points compared to the survey conducted in 2023.
- An emerging technology, generative AI, was a top concern among the 700 businesses Experian polled, with 71% saying they are worried about criminals using artificial intelligence to commit fraud.
Dive Insight:
The shift mirrors a surge in losses to fraudulent credit card transactions. Consumers lost $10 billion to fraud in 2023, a 14% increase from the previous year and the highest dollar amount the agency ever recorded.
Older respondents worried more about losing their credit card information to thieves and hackers, Experian’s survey found. Of respondents aged 55 to 69, 86% of them said they were concerned about someone stealing their credit card information, compared with 71% of respondents between the ages of 25 and 39.
Experian did not ask why consumers were afraid of bad actors stealing their credit card information, making the underlying reasons behind the increase difficult to ascertain.
However, high-profile data breaches involving credit card numbers have become a distressingly common headline in recent years. On Aug. 20, the Oregon Zoo said someone hacked its online ticketing system and compromised the credit card accounts of 100,000 visitors and American Express acknowledged that credit card information was stolen in a data breach in March.
Meanwhile, an emerging technology, generative AI — which can write short prompts and mimic human speech — is keeping business owners up at night.
The rise in worry over AI fraud shows that bad actors are evolving in their tactics, even as more time and effort is dedicated to stopping them, Peters said.
“The fraud landscape is swiftly changing,” Kathleen Peters, Experian’s chief innovation officer for North America, said in an email. “The emergence of generative AI alone has created new opportunities for fraudsters to create sophisticated schemes at scale. With technologies, and fraud schemes, developing rapidly all the time, it can be difficult for businesses to home in on what they should be focusing on when it comes to their fraud prevention strategies.”
Experian did not ask about artificial intelligence in 2023.
The survey showed that business owners who want to retain customers must show their patrons they take the problem seriously, Peters said.
“Businesses should remain close to consumer preferences and continue to innovate in order to implement the latest technologies,” she said.