Economic Shifts are Reshaping Marketplaces—and Fraudsters are Paying Attention

2 days ago
3 min read

Updated: 8 hours ago

by Brittany Allen, Sr. Trust and Safety Architect at Sift

When economic pressure builds, digital behavior changes. Commerce marketplaces feel this first.

Whether it’s inflation driving more buyers to secondhand goods, rising unemployment fueling scam job listings, or shifts in global trade causing supply instability, marketplaces absorb the turbulence. So do their fraud teams: for every new opportunity born from disruption, there’s a bad actor ready to exploit it.

Fraud continues getting more sophisticated, less predictable, and increasingly difficult to separate from legitimate activity. Tracking data trends and taking action based on those insights is no longer optional.

Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of Marketplace Fraud

Sift’s Fraud Industry Benchmarking Resource (FIBR) tracks payment fraud, ATO, and chargeback data across multiple industries, allowing companies to compare their own fraud rates to market peers. FIBR’s latest insights show that payment fraud in e-commerce marketplaces dropped to 1.6% in Q1 2025, down from a 4-quarter high. While a decline is good news on paper, lower attack rates don’t always mean less fraud. They can also indicate better concealment tactics or migration to other attack vectors.

Manual review rates tell a related story. Climbing to 6.3% in Q2 2024, rates dropped to 4.1% in Q1 2025. That can suggest a handful of stack-side improvements, including better automation, fewer false positives, or constrained staffing—and it likely reflects all three.

Credit cards remain fraudsters’ favorite currency to compromise: the vast majority of fraudulent payments are attempted with a stolen one. But looking at fraud by payment method reveals something marketplaces shouldn’t overlook:

Points-based payment methods see the highest fraud block rates (8.4%).
Financing tools and crypto follow closely at 5.4%.
Fraudsters are targeting flexible, often less-scrutinized methods to cash out quickly and anonymously.

ATO: The Hidden Threat Stalking Payouts, Listings, and PII

Marketplace accounts are identity-rich assets tied to payment methods, browsing history, location data, and in many cases, points balances or listings for goods. That makes account takeover (ATO) a high-yield tactic.

As of Q1 2025, the overall ATO rate sits at 3.2%, and 12% of users are triggering two-factor authentication—in marketplaces, those rates sit at 3.8% and 9.2% respectively.

This imbalance presents a serious vulnerability. Sophisticated fraud rings can leverage phishing, credential stuffing, and social engineering to take over accounts at scale. Marketplaces offer a near-perfect blend of urgency, financial value, and user trust for them to exploit.

Chargebacks and First-Party Fraud in a Shaky Economy

Economic stress has long been linked to increases in chargeback abuse. Whether due to buyer’s remorse, dissatisfaction, or deliberate “friendly fraud,” marketplaces experience the downstream impact in higher operational costs and strained seller relationships.

According to FIBR, the global general chargeback rate sits at 0.17%, with fraudulent chargebacks coming in at 0.098%. As a standalone segment, marketplaces have followed a parallel but less risky pattern: general chargeback rates are at 0.083%, while fraudulent chargeback rates sit at 0.032%.

These numbers reflect steady (but non-trivial) losses, and though they’ve been trending downward, that doesn’t mean the threat is dissipating. The decrease may reflect improved fraud tooling, or simply a shift in strategy from payment disputes to promotion abuse and refund fraud.

Broader Economic Signals Businesses Can’t Ignore

The rise in secondhand sales isn’t more than anecdotal. ThredUp’s 2024 resale report forecasts the global secondhand market to hit $350B by 2028, with the U.S. alone doubling its resale volume over the next five years.

Research from McKinsey states that the employment landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented, with gig work and digital jobs displacing traditional roles—a shift fraudsters exploit through scam listings and fake employer profiles. Finally, Europol and FTC both reported sharp upticks in digital fraud tied to job scams, fake marketplaces, and money mule recruitment during 2024’s global inflation spikes.

What This Means for Marketplace Risk Leaders

E-Commerce marketplace fraud isn’t just about stolen cards anymore. Account takeover, synthetic identity abuse, refund manipulation, and fake job listings all happen within platforms that are growing more complex and more essential to the global economy by the day.

It’s tempting to treat payment fraud as the north star metric, but marketplaces need to zoom out and connect the dots across all fraud types and all economic signals. A few imperatives for marketplace teams in 2025:

Invest in real-time, identity-centric fraud decisioning — not just rules-based filters.
Monitor alternative payment methods and loyalty tools as fraud vectors.
Expand detection to cover listing-level and job scam abuse, especially on platforms hosting user-generated content.
Use benchmarks like FIBR to track your performance and detect meaningful deviations before they become incidents.