Data breaches generate more headlines, but fraud is a growing cost for retailers and financial institutions, as shown by the True Cost of Fraud report just released by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Aaron Press, director of retail, e-commerce and payments for LexisNexis, said that the best measure of retail fraud is the average loss of revenue, which in the year ended March 31, 2015 was 1.32 percent of total revenue, a 94 percent increase from 2014. Merchants have bulked up spending on fraud detection systems, and this led to more fraudulent transactions being prevented, but the report found merchants still had to spend staff time and resources on trying to determine if transactions flagged as being potentially fraudulent actually were fraud, or just false positives.
