Adyen: Fraudulent chargeback scale grows
The average value of a fraudulent chargeback is going down, but it isn’t necessarily good news for retailers.
Losses associated with fraudulent chargebacks on the Adyen global financial technology platform decreased 20% year over year in 2025. However, during the same period the average value of a fraudulent dispute dropped 23%, which analysis from the 2026 Adyen “Fraud Identity Crisis” study indicates is representative of fraud expanding to include lower-value activity as it becomes easier to scale.
[READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Why chargeback rates are soaring]
The study, which combines data from Adyen’s global financial technology platform with a survey of enterprise businesses, finds that automation and AI have lowered the barrier to entry for bad actors, enabling tactics to be scripted, tested, and shared across closed networks.
First-party fraud is now the most commonly reported type of e-commerce fraud (44%), closely followed by fake accounts and identity abuse (42%) and policy or promotion abuse (40%). More traditional threats, such as stolen cards and account takeovers, were reported by 36% of businesses surveyed.
Meanwhile, Adyen platform data shows that 3% of identities account for 50% of all refund value, while 5% of identities drive 41% of fraud incidents and 58% of fraud value. The cost of handling a single first-party misuse dispute has climbed to $82, up 11% from $74 in 2024.
Other findings
The survey of enterprise businesses produced some other interesting data points:
- Nearly 70% of respondents expect fraud and abuse to limit revenue growth over the next 12 to 24 months.
- Half of respondents report rising false declines, with static controls blocking up to 10% of legitimate customers at checkout.
- Almost half (48%) of respondents view fraud management as a balance between loss prevention and growth, while 39% see it primarily as a growth-enabling function. Only 3.2% report making no fraud-related tradeoffs between loss prevention and growth in the past year.
- Three in 10 respondents identify AI-platform trust scoring as the most critical new signal needed to manage the transition to agentic commerce.
"Fraud management used to be about keeping bad actors out, but the threat has now moved inside into trusted accounts, verified identities, and even autonomous agents," said Brigette Korney, global head of performance optimization at Adyen. "The businesses that act now will have a significant advantage over those that wait and essentially underwrite the risks themselves."
The Adyen Fraud Identity Crisis study is based on transaction data from the Adyen platform covering the full year 2025, representing approximately $1.6 trillion in processed global payment volume, and a survey of 1,000 U.S.-based enterprise business decision makers between February and June 2025. Survey respondents were recruited via CensusWide, and responses are self-reported.
