Fraud In America 2025: The Interconnected Web of Financial Crime
- Financial crime data for 2025 is sobering
- These crimes are interconnected
- A FRAML approach to fraud strategies is recommended
As digital and financial environments continue to evolve, so do the fraud threats that face American consumers. In a recent post from Forbes, Dr. David Maimon paints a sobering portrait of consumer-targeted financial crime in 2025, analyzing the data compiled by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), coupled with intelligence gathered from online fraud marketplaces. This landscape is marked by staggering increases in bank account takeovers, check fraud, credit and debit card fraud, and identity theft—all of which have become not only more frequent but deeply interconnected.
The Interconnected Web of Financial Crime
Financial crime in America is no longer a set of isolated events. As Dr. Maimon points out:
A stolen check isn’t just a stolen check, it's often the opening move in a chain of crimes that leads to identity theft, account takeover, or full-blown scams.
A stolen check may be used to fuel an identity theft operation, which in turn leads to an account takeover or a spectrum of scams. For criminals, these tactics are interchangeable parts of a wider machine. For consumers, they’re manifold doorways to devastating consequences: emptied bank accounts, ruined credit, and long-lasting personal harm.
The post further points out that the dramatic and sustained rise in fraud since 2022 can be attributed to multiple factors:
- Pandemic-era scams and breaches left criminals with a trove of personal data, which was rapidly repurposed for new fraud types.
- The shift towards mobile and remote banking exposed vulnerabilities in authentication, while instant payment systems made recovery of stolen funds nearly impossible.
- Economic pressures and inflation drove more individuals to join professional “fraud-for-hire” networks, scaling up attacks and evolving old methods like check theft with renewed vigor.
Should Financial Institutions Shift Towards a More Holistic "FRAML" Approach?
Fraudster's operations are no longer a single individual or small group terrorizing a small region -- it's large crime rings in multiple parts of the world. We noted recently how mule operations -- a major component of fraud operations of organized crime rings -- span across the globe, not just the United States. How bad is it? Well, according to a press release from Biocatch in 2022, "money mules constitute up to 0.3% of accounts at U.S. financial institutions, or an estimated $3 billion in fraudulent transfers."
This necessitates that financial institutions rethink their fraud strategies to shift towards a FRAML approach, eliminating the silos and combining AML and fraud operations. As noted in an article from AMLYZE:
In the past, fraud and money laundering were often treated as separate issues, with separate departments, systems and processes. However, as the complexity and sophistication of financial crime has increased, it has been recognised that these two activities are interrelated and that two separate approaches may not be necessary. As a result, organizations should be able to identify, prevent and respond to financial crime risks more effectively.
This gives financial institutions the ability to associat fraudulent activities to a much larger picture. For instance, when a fraudulent check is identified utilizing AI technologies like Anywhere On-Us Fraud or Anywhere Deposit Fraud, the data from the transaction -- such as payor, payee, location of deposit, deposit channel, time of deposit, etc. -- are leveraged for AML to enhance account review.
As fraud operations become a global threat, a FRAML approach for financial institutions represents the most effective approach for defense against financial crimes.