Credit-transfer fraud across the EU/EEA hit €2.5 billion — up 24% in a year.

Payment fraud in the EU is growing again. The joint EBA/ECB report published in December 2025 — the official supervisory dataset collected from payment providers under PSD2 — puts total reported payment fraud across the EU/EEA at €4.2 billion for 2024. Credit transfers, the instrument virtually every European supplier invoice is paid with, are now the biggest channel at €2.5 billion, up 24% in a single year.

The nature of the fraud has changed. Strong customer authentication largely closed the door on stolen-credential fraud, so criminals switched to manipulating the payer instead: in 2024, 74% of fraudulent credit-transfer value came from scams where the account holder was deceived into authorising the payment themselves. Europol calls online fraud the fastest-growing area of organised crime in the EU, and names business email compromise among its top profit generators.

For businesses, the sharp end is supplier impersonation. French police logged 649 fraudulent-transfer-order cases against businesses and public bodies in 2024, worth €34 million. In Ireland, bank-reported SME losses to email-enabled scams reached €18.9 million over two years — invoice redirection was the majority of cases, at an average of more than €22,000 per incident.

The liability picture is what makes this existential: because these payments are technically authorised, banks are generally not obliged to refund them. Customers — not banks — bore roughly 85% of EU credit-transfer fraud losses in 2024.

EU SMEs pay virtually all supplier invoices by credit transfer — the instrument where fraud grew 24% in 2024 and where three-quarters of losses now come from deceiving the payer. The survey data shows how wide the targeting is: 60% of French SMEs faced a fraud attempt in a year, with fake-supplier fraud the most common technique, and Irish SMEs lost an average of €22,000 per invoice-redirection incident.

Unlike consumers, businesses have little safety net. Authorised payments are generally not refunded, customers bore about 85% of credit-transfer fraud losses, and the new Verification of Payee check can be opted out of in exactly the bulk payment files SMB finance teams use.

PayHQ closes the gap VoP leaves open: it checks each incoming invoice against the supplier record your team has verified — name, registration, and bank details — and flags a changed account before the payment run, whether or not your bank's name check fires.