Online Shopping Scams and Fraud: UK and Ireland Statistics for 2026

Online shopping fraud cost UK and Irish consumers well over a hundred million pounds and euros between them last year, and the losses keep climbing. Fake retailer sites, cloned marketplace listings and manipulated bank transfers now sit behind more reported scams than almost any other tactic criminals use. This guide sets out the newest UK, Irish and global figures on online shopping fraud, explains why the numbers keep rising, and gives practical steps for spotting a scam before you pay.

Key Online Shopping Fraud Statistics at a Glance

Before the details, here are the headline figures on online shopping fraud across the UK, Ireland and the wider world. Every figure below comes from a named source published in 2025 or 2026, and each one is explored fully further down the page.

• Global e-commerce fraud losses reached $48 billion in 2025 and are projected to climb to $107 billion by 2029 (Juniper Research).
• UK payment fraud losses totalled £1.28 billion in 2025, a four per cent rise on the year before (UK Finance).
• Purchase scams made up 71 per cent of authorised push payment fraud cases in the UK, with losses of £118.1 million (UK Finance).
• One in five regular online shoppers in Ireland lost money to a scam in the past year (FraudSMART, Banking & Payments Federation Ireland).
• Fraud losses reported through Ireland’s Central Bank rose 27 per cent to €179 million in 2025.
• Poorly tuned fraud filters block an estimated $443 billion of legitimate sales worldwide every year, nine times the value of the fraud they are meant to stop (Riskified).

How Big Is Online Shopping Fraud Globally

Online shopping fraud is not a one-country problem, and the figures have grown every year this decade. Juniper Research and LexisNexis both track merchant losses closely, and their most recent reports show exactly which direction things are heading.

Juniper Research puts global e-commerce fraud losses at $48 billion in 2025, up from $44.3 billion the year before, and forecasts a rise to $107 billion by 2029. That is a jump of more than 140 per cent in five years, driven largely by automated attacks and a growing share of disputes that are not straightforward theft at all.

LexisNexis found that US merchants now spend $4.61 for every $1 of direct fraud, once chargeback fees, lost stock, manual review labour and legal costs are added on top. Visa’s 2025 fraud report put first-party misuse, often called friendly fraud, at around 20 to 30 per cent of all fraudulent disputes globally, and the Merchant Risk Council found that 64 per cent of merchants had seen this kind of dispute rise in the past year. In plain terms, a growing share of “fraud” losses are shoppers disputing charges for goods they did receive, not criminals stealing card details.

The other side of that coin is arguably more costly. Riskified estimates that overly cautious fraud filters wrongly decline $443 billion of genuine transactions a year worldwide, roughly nine times the value of the fraud those same filters catch. Retailers who tighten their rules too far end up turning away paying customers rather than stopping criminals.

Online Shopping Fraud in the UK

The UK has some of the most detailed fraud reporting of any country, thanks to UK Finance, Action Fraud and the Payment Systems Regulator. Their latest figures give a clear picture of how online shopping fraud affects British consumers, and who is expected to cover the bill when it happens.

Purchase Scams and Authorised Push Payment Fraud

UK Finance’s Annual Fraud Report 2026 shows purchase scams, where a shopper pays for goods that never arrive or do not match what was advertised, made up 71 per cent of all authorised push payment fraud cases, with losses rising 20 per cent to £118.1 million. Across all authorised push payment fraud, losses climbed 19 per cent to £576.4 million and case numbers rose seven per cent to 248,070. Sixty-six per cent of these cases began online, with a further 17 per cent starting through telecoms channels such as phone calls or texts, which shows how much of this fraud is initiated on the same platforms where people shop.

The Payment Systems Regulator’s Reimbursement Rules

Since 7 October 2024, UK payment providers have been required to reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud up to £85,000 per claim under rules set by the Payment Systems Regulator. The bill is split equally between the sending and receiving payment firm; refunds must normally arrive within five working days, and a £100 excess can apply except for vulnerable customers. The regulator’s own data shows the cap covers 99.8 per cent of cases by volume and around 90 per cent by value, so almost every shopper caught out by a scam is entitled to some money back, though the largest losses are only partially protected.

Action Fraud Reports and Recent Trends

Action Fraud recorded roughly 68,000 online shopping fraud reports in the 2023-24 financial year, with losses of more than £56.3 million, a 20 per cent rise on the £46.6 million reported the year before. More recent telemetry from Gen, the company behind Norton and Avast, found UK online shopping scams jumped 416 per cent quarter on quarter in the final three months of 2025, driven largely by malicious advertising and fake shopfronts appearing on social media platforms.

Office for National Statistics figures for the year ending March 2025 show overall fraud offences fell four per cent, yet computer misuse offences recorded by Action Fraud rose 36 per cent, and buying or selling items online remained the single most common reason for contact between a victim and an offender, cited in a quarter of all cases.

Online Shopping Fraud in Ireland and Northern Ireland

Ireland and Northern Ireland are largely missing from the big international statistical roundups, despite facing many of the same threats as the rest of the UK and mainland Europe. The Central Bank of Ireland and FraudSMART both publish figures that fill much of that gap.

The Central Bank of Ireland recorded €179 million in fraud and scam losses during 2025, up 27 per cent on 2024, with authorised push payment fraud now accounting for 45 per cent of that total by value, or €74.86 million, up from just over 35 per cent the year before. Central Bank research also found that more than a third of Irish consumers report having experienced fraud at some point, with online purchase fraud the single most common type. Most losses are modest, with the majority of affected consumers losing under €250, though around one in ten lost between €250 and €499.

FraudSMART, the awareness initiative run by the Banking & Payments Federation Ireland, found that one in five regular online shoppers lost money to a scam in the past year, with some individuals losing hundreds or thousands of euros. The same research found that one in five shoppers admit they do not take basic security precautions, such as checking a website’s legitimacy before paying. Northern Ireland shoppers sit at the crossing point of UK and Irish payment systems and scam trends, and the PSNI’s ScamwiseNI campaign runs alongside Action Fraud reporting to raise awareness of the same purchase and marketplace scams affecting the rest of the UK and Ireland.

Common Types of Online Shopping Fraud

Understanding the shape of online shopping fraud makes it far easier to spot before money changes hands. Most cases fall into a handful of recognisable patterns.

Fake and cloned retailer websites imitate well-known brands or invent entirely fictional stores, often advertised through paid social media posts. Marketplace scams are a close second: TSB’s 2025 fraud data found that 73 per cent of UK purchase fraud starts on Facebook Marketplace, and Experian research found 37 per cent of Britons have been scammed while buying or selling on an online marketplace. Account takeover, where a criminal gains access to an existing shopper account and places orders using saved payment details, remains common wherever password reuse is widespread, which is one reason a good password manager is worth the switch.

Friendly fraud, where a genuine buyer disputes a charge for goods they did receive, now makes up a meaningful share of retailer losses. Phishing links sent by text or email that lead to convincing fake checkout pages remain one of the most common entry points, a pattern covered in more depth in our review of phishing attack trends. Social engineering, where a scammer builds trust before asking a shopper to pay by bank transfer outside normal buyer protection, now drives more purchase scams than simple stolen card details, as set out in our guide to social engineering attacks.

Why Online Shopping Fraud Keeps Rising

The scale of online shopping fraud has grown alongside the tools available to criminals, and 2025 marked a clear shift in tactics rather than a simple increase in volume.

Generative AI now produces convincing fake shopfronts, product images and even video adverts at a scale that was not possible a few years ago. Gen’s telemetry found malvertising, malicious online advertising, accounted for 41 per cent of all attacks against individuals recorded in 2025, with malicious push notifications up 30 per cent in the final quarter alone.

Synthetic identity fraud, where criminals blend real and fabricated personal details to build new identities, surged sharply between the first quarters of 2024 and 2025 according to identity verification firm Sumsub. At the same time, cross-border e-commerce and the continued shift of retail spending online give fraudsters a larger pool of transactions to hide inside, while first-party misuse of chargeback systems adds a further layer of loss that has little to do with stolen card data at all.

Fake webshop networks have also grown far beyond individual scam sites. Security researchers at SRLabs uncovered a network they named BogusBazaar operating more than 75,000 domains built on expired addresses with an established Google reputation, which had already affected over 850,000 shoppers and processed more than $50 million in fraudulent orders since 2021.

Separate research from Malwarebytes mapped a further network of over 20,000 fake shops sharing infrastructure and identical storefront templates, and found that more than 80,000 fake stores appeared during the 2024 holiday shopping season alone, many disappearing or rebranding within days of going live. Facebook and YouTube were identified as the main platforms used to advertise these sites, which is part of why treating any unfamiliar retailer with a healthy dose of scepticism matters just as much as checking your bank statement afterwards.

The Hidden Cost of Over-Cautious Fraud Filters

Retailers understandably want to block online shopping fraud before it happens, but the cure can be worse than the disease if the fraud filter is set too tight. Riskified’s $443 billion figure for wrongly declined transactions dwarfs the roughly $48 billion lost to actual fraud each year, meaning legitimate shoppers turned away at checkout represent a far bigger drag on retail revenue than criminals do.

The practical takeaway for shoppers is that a payment being declined or flagged for extra checks is not necessarily a sign that anything is wrong with your card. It is often simply the retailer’s fraud system being cautious, and a quick call to your bank usually resolves it.

How to Protect Yourself When Shopping Online

A handful of consistent habits account for most of the difference between shoppers who lose money to online shopping fraud and those who do not.

Check a retailer’s legitimacy before paying, particularly for a site or seller you have not used before. Look up the company on Companies House if it claims to be UK-registered, check how long the domain has been active, and search for the exact business name alongside the word “reviews” or “scam”. Pay by credit card where possible rather than bank transfer, since card payments carry chargeback protection that a direct transfer does not.

Turn on two-factor authentication for your email and any shopping accounts you use regularly, since a compromised account is one of the fastest routes into identity theft and unauthorised orders. Use a unique password for every retailer account rather than reusing the same one everywhere. Treat unsolicited links in texts, emails or social media adverts with suspicion, especially if the deal looks unusually generous, and keep your device’s software and browser updated so known scam techniques are blocked automatically.

What to Do If You Think You’ve Been Scammed

Acting quickly gives you the best chance of recovering money lost to online shopping fraud, and the right first call depends on where you are.

In the UK, contact your bank or card provider immediately to flag the transaction and ask about a chargeback or, for authorised push payment cases, the Payment Systems Regulator’s reimbursement scheme. Report the incident to Action Fraud, or to Police Scotland directly if you are in Scotland, so the details feed into national fraud intelligence. In Ireland, contact your bank straight away, report the incident to An Garda Síochána, and pass the details to FraudSMART so the pattern can be tracked alongside other reports.

Building good habits before you shop, rather than only reacting after a loss, makes the biggest long-term difference, and our guide to positive online behaviours covers the everyday habits that reduce your exposure across shopping, banking and social media alike. For wider guidance on securing your accounts and devices, the National Cyber Security Centre’s shopping safety advice is a reliable independent starting point.

Online shopping fraud is not going away, but the data shows exactly where the risk sits and who is being targeted. Checking a retailer before you pay, using a credit card rather than a bank transfer for anything unfamiliar, and reporting problems quickly all cut your chances of becoming one of next year’s statistics.

Frequently Asked Questions