Card Fraud Costs $8.6 Billion Per Year

An estimated $8.6 billion in loses annually will be incurred by the U.S. card payments industry, according to the Aite Group. Analysts from Aite state that combating card fraud involves anticipating scammers' next moves based on rapid technological advancements, and choosing which anti-fraud campaigns to wage. Prohibitively expensive deployment costs and the elimination of signature interchange makes the universal upgrading of U.S. card technologies unlikely. The Aite analysts cite end-to-end encryption as the most practical contemporary technique for ameliorating card fraud, in view of the relative speed and cost efficiency for implementation. "Criminals need access to deep seams of card data," says Aite analyst and report author Nick Holland. "Cutting off the supply of data via a national-level deployment of end-to-end encryption would significantly reduce counterfeit and lost and stolen card fraud."