Gaming, travel and the leisure industries have seen a rise of 17% in digital fraud attempts globally in the second quarter of 2021.

The pattern is in line with well-established cybercriminal behaviour of attacking industries seeing sudden, pivoted movement, with travel being particularly hard hit with attacks – enduring a 156% increase as the industry has begun to open up again following the pandemic.

Commenting on this trend, director of fraud and ID at TransUnion in the UK, Sarah Golding, says: “Cybercriminals will periodically shift their focus in line with consumer habits and with many countries, including the UK, beginning to relax Covid-19 restrictions, we saw a surge of transactions being targeted in the travel and leisure industry.”

TransUnion came to discover this trend through monitoring reported fraud attempts with their statistics obtained through analysing billions of transactions across 40,000 websites and apps.

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It’s analyses also found fraud attempts continued to rise across global financial services with a rise of 149% in the first four months of this year compared to the last four months of 2020.

Josh Gunnell, head of fraud and ID pre-sales at TransUnion in the UK, adds: “Our latest data aligns with industry statistics which confirm the extent to which fraudsters are taking advantage of the changes in consumer behaviour resulting from the pandemic.

“Businesses will need to examine their fraud prevention strategies to respond to the increase in online spending and to be able to deal with sudden shifts in attempts across different industries, in order to maintain consumer trust.”

These latest statistics follows data presented by Atlas VPN last week that showed that the UK has encountered 14.6 million ransomware attack attempts this year alone.