FATF launches multi-year roadmap to tackle $500bn global fraud losses

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has set out a multi-year plan aimed at fraud losses it says reach $500bn a year worldwide. For banks, FinTechs, payment providers, and other PSPs, the practical point is simple: fraud is moving further into the FATF’s AML frame, which means more scrutiny of scam flows, mule activity, and how existing controls are actually working.

1. Giles Thomson, the new FATF president, unveiled the roadmap on 1 July 2026, the opening day of his two-year term leading the global AML watchdog under the UK’s presidency. Thomson also serves as director for economic crime and sanctions at HM Treasury.
2. The FATF says the problem is large enough to force a change in focus. Thomson said fraud costs $500 billion a year across the world, and that fraud was “the predominant predicate offense in 90% of the FATF mutual evaluations done across the global network in our last round.” In other words, this is no longer being treated as a side issue sitting next to money laundering; it is becoming part of the core AML conversation.
3. The roadmap has two stages. From July to October 2026, the FATF will gather detailed fraud typologies from banks, regulators, and policymakers, with attention on scam compounds and the industrial-scale operations behind romance fraud, investment scams, and pig butchering schemes. For payment providers, that usually means requests for data, case studies, and control examples arrive before the policy language does.
4. The second stage runs from evidence gathering to action. The FATF expects recommendations by February 2027 on how it can extend its existing toolkit, with implementation running through to June 2028. Thomson said the organisation will then look at “what is working well, best practices, and how we can scale those.”
5. Alongside the roadmap, the FATF will form a private sector consultative group to guide the project team and will host a “Global Response Against Fraud” event in spring 2027, building on the UNODC-INTERPOL Global Fraud Summit.

For compliance teams, the immediate takeaways are straightforward: typology requests are coming before October 2026, transaction monitoring focused on mule activity and cross-border scam flows is likely to face closer review, and fraud and AML teams will keep getting pushed closer together as fraud is folded into the AML predicate offence framework.