US banks must prepare for FIFA World Cup fraud surge: Entersekt

Ahead of an anticipated fraud surge during the biggest sporting event of 2026 in North America, Entersekt warns U.S. banks must upgrade their authentication systems. Financial institutions in Europe show a couple of methods available on the market.

Next year Earth’s biggest sports tournament will take place in North America. That is, of course, the FIFA World Cup — the most watched sporting event in the world, which will take place from June 11 to July 19, 2026.

The tournament will be staged across 16 cities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with the majority of matches taking place in the United States. As 5.5 million football (or “soccer”) fans are expected to arrive in eleven U.S. cities, fraud prevention experts are warning banks to strengthen their protections.

“Banks, payment processors and merchants must ensure they are adequately prepared for the influx of international payments as well as the inevitable increase in fraud attempts that come with these mega events,” writes CMO Frank Moreno, from financial authentication company Entersekt.

Thankfully, there are lessons to be gained from previous World Cups, such as the 2022 FIFA World in Qatar where the volume of scam emails doubled across the Gulf countries, and financial fraud significantly increased as bad actors created fraudulent websites for hotel bookings and other services, diverting money from genuine local businesses. Stolen credit card details sold on the dark web, known as “carding,” also surged as phishing scams profited from fake FIFA-themed websites.

While fraud protections should be put in place, the increase in visitors shouldn’t mean an increase in frustrated consumers. That customers want a smooth and secure payment experience is a given, but with the influx of international visitors this may make things trickier.  Moreno is urging U.S. banks to adopt more secure methods besides one-time passcodes (OTPs) as these are being increasingly targeted by fraudsters. “Biometrics, FIDO passkeys, and in-app notifications with transaction details are becoming the gold standard for secure authentication,” Moreno writes.

Innovating to mitigate fraud risks

This is where companies are innovating as well. Germany-based Unzer, for example, has introduced “Direct Bank Transfer” which is a payment method that allows customers to pay directly from their bank accounts without needing a credit or debit card. Enabled by open banking, the service is available to merchants in Germany and works across all SEPA countries (EU member states plus additional countries).

Transactions are processed via existing bank authentication systems, such as biometric authentication. “With Unzer Direct Transfer, we’ve launched a simple and trustworthy payment method based on Mastercard’s open banking platform,” said Timo Seifert, director of product at Unzer.

It addresses fraud risks in Germany as well, and across SEPA, as a report by BioCatch on digital banking fraud warns of a “fundamental shift” in fraud risk for banks within SEPA as instant payments take off. BioCatch cites the European Banking Authority’s assessments that show the risk of fraudulent transfers is up to 10 times higher in instant credit transfers compared to regular credit transfers.

Faster decisioning for quicker onboarding

Alloy has announced that its identity and fraud prevention platform can now “decision” on more than eight billion financial events per month, which is an increase of more than 400 percent. Using products from Amazon Web Services, the company serves financial institutions and fintechs to manage identity risk.

Alloy leveraged Amazon Aurora Serverless, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to create a data layer that can ingest 3,200 events per second per customer. This means Alloy can now compute approximately 1,200 real-time decisions per second, and onboard approximately 600 entities per second.

“As Alloy and our clients grow, we need to be able to support an increased number of decisioning events,” said Charles Hearn, CTO and co-founder of Alloy. “At every stage of our growth, AWS has helped us to ensure we not only maintain the capacity for today, but also can easily scale for tomorrow.”

Alloy’s current clients include Navy Federal Credit Union, Ally Bank and Carta top U.S. banks and credit unions.

Article Topics

Alloy  |  behavioral biometrics  |  BioCatch  |  biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  Entersekt  |  financial services  |  fraud prevention  |  Mastercard  |  onboarding  |  open banking  |  passkeys  |  World Cup