The 2015 holiday shopping season saw fraud attempts rise, with rates soaring on key dates, according to new benchmark data from ACI Worldwide.

The company said in a press release that the data, based on hundreds of millions of transactions from global retailers during the 2014 and 2015 holiday shopping season (starting on Black Friday and ending on Dec. 31), details what led to a huge increase in omnichannel shopping transaction volume growth and a corresponding sizable increase in fraud attempts.

Principle findings include:

• from Thanksgiving to Dec. 31, 2015, the number of e-commerce transactions grew by 21 percent year over year, while fraud attempts grew by 8 percent;
• fraud attempt rates were highest on Christmas Eve (2.4 percent); Thanksgiving (2 percent); Black Friday (1.8 percent); and holiday shipment cut-off days (1.6 percent). This is a result of two key trends:
  • electronic gift cards, which have the highest fraud attempt rates across all products, were a popular last-minute gift purchase; and
  • buy online/pick-up in-store, which has a higher fraud attempt rate than other modes of delivery, increased.
• increase in attempted fraud rates for buy online/pick up in-store (up 47 percent — even more than ACI predicted), as well as next day and overnight delivery (up 50 percent); and
• international sales for global merchants increased by 29 percent by volume and 22 percent by value — a trend driven by favorable currency rates, shipment costs, and regional-specific products.

"Global commerce has seen a huge increase in the past year, and it is critical for merchants to have integrated fraud prevention monitoring with cross-border payment acceptance, along with single tokenization and a single view of the customer," said Mike Braatz, senior vice president of merchant and risk solutions for ACI Worldwide. "Merchants must implement a sophisticated multilayered, multidimensional approach to fraud prevention for all transaction channels."