IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bdi/opques/qef_986_25.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The risk of payment card fraud: an analysis of the Italian market over the period 2015-24

Author

Listed:
  • Matteo D'Amato

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Paolo Finaldi Russo

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Raffaele Santioni

    (Bank of Italy)

  • Luca Tomassetti

    (Bank of Italy)

Abstract

This study analyses developments in fraudulent transactions on payment cards in Italy over the period 2015 to 2024 and was conducted in the perspective of highlighting the risk to users of being victims of fraud, adopting a customer protection approach. Our results show that the fraud rate on individual payments has remained very low: today, fraud affects only 13 out of every 100,000 transactions, resulting in a loss of €18 for every €100,000 of payments. However, the growing use of payment cards has led to a significant increase in the likelihood of individuals experiencing fraud. The study proposes several indicators that approximate this risk. These have more than doubled over the period considered: fraudulent transactions now affect 2.9 per cent of the adult population, 1.2 per cent of payment cards in circulation, and 2.0 per cent of bank account holders. The risk of fraud is higher, on average, for clients of larger intermediaries compared with the rest of the system, probably because fraudsters are able access a wider pool of customers.

Suggested Citation

  • Matteo D'Amato & Paolo Finaldi Russo & Raffaele Santioni & Luca Tomassetti, 2025. "The risk of payment card fraud: an analysis of the Italian market over the period 2015-24," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 986, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    • Handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_986_25
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2025-0986/QEF_986_25.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D18 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Protection
    • E42 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Monetary Sytsems; Standards; Regimes; Government and the Monetary System
    • G2 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_986_25. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bdigvit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.