Visa identifies five transformative forces reshaping global payment security

Visa (NYSE: V) today released its Fall 2025 Biannual Threats Report, revealing five forces that are transforming the global payments security landscape.

The report, produced by Visa’s Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control (PERC) team, draws on intelligence from Visa’s global network to identify how criminal operations are evolving with unprecedented speed, scale, and sophistication.

„The payments ecosystem is experiencing a paradigm shift in how fraud operates,” said Paul Fabara, Chief Risk and Client Services Officer at Visa. „Criminals are no longer working as opportunistic individuals– they’re operating like tech startups, building reusable infrastructure and deploying systematic, industrial-scale operations that challenge conventional defenses. Understanding these evolving forces is critical for the entire ecosystem to stay ahead of emerging threats.”

The Industrialization of Fraud:
Fraud has evolved from opportunistic crime into systematic, industrial-scale operations. Criminals are building reusable infrastructure—including botnets, synthetic identities, templated scam scripts, and AI tooling—that can be deployed across multiple attack types simultaneously with the efficiency and scalability of a technology enterprise.

The Monetization Playbook:
Criminals are operating with sophisticated dual-speed strategies: moving slowly and deliberately when stockpiling stolen credentials to maximize reach and evade detection.

The Authenticity Crisis: The proliferation of sophisticated impersonation techniques and synthetic content is creating unprecedented challenges in verifying legitimate transactions and communications across the payment ecosystem.

The Control Erosion Problem: Traditional security controls are being systematically tested and circumvented as criminals identify and exploit gaps in legacy defense mechanisms.