TransUnion, a consumer credit reporting agency, has released new findings around global e-commerce fraud trends that occurred during the 2021 holiday shopping season. The study found 17.5% of all global e-commerce transactions and 3.6% of Kenyan transactions between November 25th to 29th were fraudulent.
Globally, this is 3.7% higher than the same 5 day period leading up to Cyber Monday in 2020. For transactions originating from Kenya, the percentage of suspected fraudulent transactions decreased by 16.5% compared to a similar period last year.
These findings are based on intelligence from billions of transactions contained in TransUnion’s fraud analytics solution suite, TruValidate.
According to the report, the top two reasons for potentially fraudulent e-commerce transactions were the number of accounts per device and evidence of previous fraud on the account or device.
In addition to the above findings, TransUnion released the following fraud analysis for Kenya regarding the percentage of suspected fraudulent e-commerce transactions during the start of the holiday shopping season and entire year from 2019 to 2021.
- 3.6% from November 25-29, 2021; 3.8% so far in 2021
- 4.3% from November 26-30, 2020; 5.5% in 2020
- 7.6% from November 28-December 2, 2019; 7.7% in 2019
“The holiday shopping season is a popular time for bad actors to engage in fraudulent activity, particularly in the e-commerce and retail industry. Online shopping is the new norm for most consumers and that trend has been further accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Consumers want to shop with online retailers that not only provide a seamless user experience, but also take consumer security and privacy seriously,” said Samuel Tayengwa, head of product for TransUnion rest of Africa regions.
TransUnion monitors digital fraud attempts reported by businesses in varied industries such as gambling, gaming, financial services, healthcare, insurance, retail, and travel and leisure, among others.