In-person event
Online fraud poses one of the most pressing challenges to the integrity of the EU’s payment systems. It threatens consumer confidence, undermines business resilience and imposes significant direct and indirect losses across the payment value chain. As electronic transactions and digital finance expand across borders, fraud tactics grow more sophisticated, ranging from authorised push payment scams and account takeovers to large-scale mule networks, eroding trust in payments and in the digital single market.
Modern retail payment fraud exploits a highly fragmented ecosystem where multiple actors – including digital platforms and telecom operators but also technical service providers – play a role in enabling transactions but are not always subject to equivalent preventive duties or liability frameworks. This structural asymmetry increasingly weakens the EU’s ability to contain fraud, as responsibility remains concentrated in payment service providers even when vulnerabilities originate elsewhere.
This seminar will bring together policymakers, industry and consumer representatives to examine the main drivers and vulnerabilities and clarify where responsibilities and incentives lie. We will discuss what works in practice: smarter authentication and reimbursement frameworks, stronger data-sharing and analytics among payment service providers and platforms, and proportionate supervisory guardrails. Our aim is to move towards a coherent framework in which fraud prevention and accountability are treated as complementary, not separate, objectives – ensuring that consumers are protected swiftly while every actor in the chain contributes to prevention in line with their role and capacity.
