Tech’s fraud fight: A shared burden

The UK’s financial crime landscape isn’t just facing a crisis; it has reached a critical tipping point. It’s a situation where banks are forced to guard the back door while the real thieves walk in through the wide-open front gates of social media and telecom networks.

This was the unmistakable message delivered by UK Finance at the 2025 Economic Crime Congress. Global technology platforms, from search engines to messaging apps were warned to “grasp the scale of the crisis” and finally accept their role in stopping a national fraud epidemic.

This isn’t a minor problem. It’s a national security threat that is playing out on the balance sheets of both financial institutions and their customers. With fraud now accounting for more than 40% of all crime in the UK, criminals are stealing at scale. They pocketed a shocking £629.3 million in the first half of 2025 alone, marking a three per cent year on year increase in losses.

The central source of frustration, and the biggest obstacle to an effective defense, is the fundamental mismatch in accountability.

The Regulatory Disparity: A £38 Billion Burden

For years, the financial services industry has been expected to operate as the primary bulwark against economic crime. The sector funnels a staggering £38 billion annually into compliance. Yet, as industry leaders point out, the majority of that massive investment is driven by anti-money laundering (AML) rules, not preventative measures against the fraud originating on third-party platforms.

This creates a perverse and unsustainable imbalance. Financial institutions are left to shoulder the financial and regulatory burden for scams that begin outside their ecosystem. The vast majority of fraud starts on social media and telecom platforms, where criminals cultivate their victims long before an illicit payment is ever requested. Banks are the last line of defense, often facing mandatory reimbursement obligations for Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud, regardless of where the deception began.

The warnings are clear: this structure is no longer tenable. Lawmakers and enforcement agencies are now demanding change, focusing on several core areas that require immediate tech sector cooperation:

• Stronger Identity Verification: Tighter controls on user onboarding across major platforms to strip criminals of their anonymity.

• Live Data Sharing: Creating enhanced legal and technical frameworks to facilitate the real-time exchange of threat intelligence between finance, law enforcement, and technology companies.

• Tougher Regulation: Establishing a regulatory framework that imposes comparable, meaningful accountability and cost exposure on the platforms that host the initial scam activity.

The AI Acceleration: Fraud’s New Frontier

The criminals aren’t just getting better; they’re getting a high powered AI upgrade. The attacks are becoming exponentially more sophisticated, driven by generative AI.

As Perttu Nihti, Chief Product and Technology Officer of Basware, notes, AI is not just a tool for content creation; it’s now “accelerating invoice and payment fraud at an alarming pace.” The data confirms the shift: Basware’s research indicates that 62% of businesses now cite generative AI as a key driver behind the surge in invoice fraud attempts.

Tools like deepfakes and manipulated documents are making it harder than ever for human led processes to detect a fraudulent transaction or request. This new wave of technical sophistication exposes critical vulnerabilities in traditional, manual financial processes, leaving overstretched finance teams dangerously exposed.

In a shocking indictment of corporate preparedness, the same research found that a staggering 90% of organizations still lack the technology, skills, and resources to prevent fraud effectively.

The only solution is a rapid convergence. Experts agree that adopting AI powered automation for defense strategies is no longer optional. For financial institutions and the businesses, they serve, automated solutions enable real time monitoring, faster detection, and stronger protection of cash flow against these rapidly evolving attacks.

A Shared Responsibility for a Shared Digital Economy

The message from the Economic Crime Congress is unambiguous: the fight against fraud is now a shared responsibility.

It is unacceptable for Big Tech to profit from the networks where crime thrives while the financial sector is left to pick up the majority of the losses. The effectiveness of the UK’s fraud response, and by extension the integrity of the transatlantic digital economy that serves both UK and US businesses, will now hinge on how quickly and meaningfully global technology platforms collaborate with the wider financial ecosystem.

As the threat of AI driven deception expands, only a multi sector approach that places preventative obligations squarely at the point of origin will be enough to protect consumers and safeguard the global financial stack.