Philippine businesses lost an estimated P4 trillion—or about 6 percent of their annual revenues—to fraud in 2024, according to a survey of 200 business leaders by TransUnion.
The country’s business leaders are highly concerned, with seven in every ten (70 percent) expressing extreme worry about fraud’s impact.
This placed the Philippines as the third highest-ranking country for fraud concerns globally, following the United States (89 percent) and India (82 percent), as noted in TransUnion’s second-half of 2025 update to its Top Fraud Trends Report.
First-party fraud and scams, or authorized fraud, were identified by 25 percent of business leaders as the most significant sources of loss in the Philippines. This is higher than the global averages of 16 percent for first-party fraud and 24 percent for authorized fraud.
TransUnion Philippines chief commercial officer Yogesh Daware said “fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated, exploiting every channel and digital interaction to bypass traditional defenses.”
He noted that the higher-than-average reported first-party fraud losses in the Philippines “points to a distinct local challenge. Detection requires deeper, data-driven insights into identity and behavior.”
First-party fraud involves identity misrepresentation or information falsification for financial gain, while authorized fraud refers to schemes that trick individuals into voluntarily giving up something of value.
Consumers in the Philippines are also heavily targeted, with 65 percent reporting being targeted by fraud attempts between February and May 2025.
This compares to the global average of 48 percent. The most common schemes were phishing (45 percent), money or gift card scams (40.4 percent) and smishing (39.7 percent).
The suspected digital fraud rate for consumer transactions in the Philippines reached 4.4 percent in the first half of 2025, also exceeding the global average of 3.8 percent.
Daware said the impact of fraud extends beyond businesses and individuals to the wider economy.
“Protecting both consumers and businesses is non-negotiable,” he said, calling for “an end-to-end approach that closes vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.”
He said investing in smarter prevention tools and ongoing fraud education will help protect businesses and build consumer trust for a safer, more inclusive digital economy.
