“Friendly fraud” is set to cost $4.8 billion in 2028, and banks are trying to get ahead of it

First-party fraud is rising, and Datos Insights says global card-related losses will climb from an estimated $3.9 billion in 2025 to $4.8 billion in 2028. For banks and PSPs, the useful part of that number is not the headline itself but the direction of travel: dispute abuse is becoming a larger operational and fraud-control problem at the same time agentic commerce is expanding.

1. According to Datos Insights, global card-related first-party fraud is expected to cost financial institutions and merchants $4.8 billion in 2028, up from $3.9 billion in 2025. The firm also said that between 2023 and 2024, 35% of FIs and 64% of merchants reported year-over-year increases in card-related first-party fraud.
2. The estimate is conservative by design. Datos did not include losses from account and credit-level fraud, noncard payments, or the operational overhead created by processing these claims, which means the real cost to banks and merchants is higher than the card-only figure suggests.
3. Jim Mortensen, strategic advisor in the fraud and AML practice at Datos, said first-party fraud is “a big area of concern for banks, right after what's happening in agentic use of AI by fraudsters.” That matters because agentic commerce adds more room for automated abuse, not less.
4. Mastercard has been pushing its First-Party Trust program since 2024 in the U.S. and has recently expanded it to parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The program is meant to help merchants and issuers distinguish genuine fraud from first-party misuse more accurately; Visa has a similar initiative called Compelling Evidence 3.0.
5. Mastercard has said merchants and issuers estimate that roughly 20% of disputes are linked to first-party fraud, making it one of the largest contributors to preventable chargebacks. In practice, that is the part banks cannot afford to treat as a simple disputes-management issue.

The other problem is that a transactional-only fraud stack misses the way these schemes now operate. Soups Ranjan, co-founder and chief executive of Sardine, said fraud rings are increasingly recruiting through social media, then moving conversations off-platform, which means the activity does not always look suspicious in a single payment flow. For banks, that is the point: first-party fraud is no longer just a chargeback nuisance, it is a broader fraud-identification problem.