The Euro Banking Association (EBA) today issued version 7.0 of the EBA Fraud Taxonomy, which will take effect on 1 January 2027. The taxonomy is reviewed on an annual basis with the support of fraud fighters from financial institutions across Europe. The aim of this process is to ensure that the taxonomy continues to fit the changing needs of fraud experts in Europe and beyond.

Version 7.0 has been updated to reflect the latest fraud trends identified by the experts participating in the Association’s Expert Group on Payment Fraud-related Topics (EGPF), which has developed the EBA Fraud Taxonomy. The following principal updates have been included in version 7.0:

• The modus ‘emotional manipulation’ in the high-level classification ‘please help’ has been replaced with the following three more specific modi: ‘support a friend or family member fraud’, ‘romance fraud’ and ‘charity / donation fraud’.

• Three new labels/tags have been added covering, respectively, suspected money mule activity and a fraud trend referred to as ‘card chip relay’.

An overview of the changes introduced into version 7.0 is set out in the Annex of the document.

The EBA Fraud Taxonomy provides a simplified and straightforward framework to describe fraud scenarios related to all kinds of payments, including card transactions. It equips fraud fighters with a harmonised pan-European vocabulary and categorisation approach for naming and organising fraud types for payments. This makes fraud data and intelligence comparable and, consequently, improves the quality of fraud monitoring, reporting and information sharing.

The fraud taxonomy is well-placed to support the overall shift towards coordinated, pan-European fraud-fighting, e.g. by helping to classify data that may be shared through information-sharing arrangements under the forthcoming Payment Services Regulation.