The fraud hiding in plain sight at the application stage

By Dave Rossi

In 2025, more than 444,000 fraud cases ¹ were recorded on the National Fraud Database, the highest annual total ever reported by Cifas. The UK government's Fraud Strategy 2026-2029 ² rightly recognises the scale of this challenge, and much of the industry's attention remains focused on the most visible threats: unauthorised payments, fake IDs and anomalous transactions. Yet the most scalable, least detected and most preventable fraud occurs much earlier: at the point of application.