2027 Fraud Management Trends

In 2027, liability will be one of the most consequential forces shaping fraud and scam risk. As liability frameworks evolve, fraudsters prioritize targeting industry players that do not have the incentives to invest in robust controls. Effective frameworks assign shared liability to industry actors in accordance with their prevention capacity. However, this outcome is not at all inevitable. The resulting frameworks depend significantly on whether those bearing a disproportional amount of losses can shift liability to other actors and whether sufficient information on the scope of the problem is being tracked. 

This report focuses on three major trends in 2027 with far-reaching ramifications: shifting scam liability, emerging liability frameworks for agentic commerce, and the governance of agentic fraud tools. In the United States, scam liability has fallen primarily on consumers and, to a much lesser extent, their financial institutions. However, the severe impact on consumers is increasing pressure for liability to be shared across more industry participants, especially telecommunications and social media platforms. At the same time, agentic commerce is expected to ramp up under a growing patchwork of liability frameworks that will shape which schemes fraudsters scale. Agentic fraud tools will become best practice across U.S. financial institutions as scams and fraud continue to rise, but only where strong internal governance can limit unintended risk. 

These trends highlight the importance of industry collaboration to address the rapidly accelerating growth of fraud and scams.