Taken from the ‘State of Fraud 2025: Banks and Building Societies’ report, the statistics are based on analysis of National SIRA. Owned and operated by Synectics, National SIRA is the UK’s largest source of evolving risk intelligence. It’s a vast pool of collated risk and fraud intelligence, sourced from the UK’s largest membership of over 150 organisations including Tier 1, mid-size, and challenger banks, and leading building societies.

While current accounts still see the biggest volume of such activity, the savings account data suggests that money launderers and their mules are attempting to disperse activity across a wider range of financial products as part of their networks.

According to the report, ‘Misuse of facility’ (which aggregates all laundering-related reasons for filing) remains the dominant fraud typology by volume in the UK today. Closely followed by ID fraud.

Mule behaviours have manoeuvred in line with banking trends.

The data indicates that fraudsters are increasingly bypassing onboarding processes, but also that they are adapting their modus operandi.

Liese Rushton, Fraud Strategy Consultant at Synectics, said: “Post-PSR Mandatory Reimbursement, mules and their herders faced a tactical tipping point. Knowing that account providers would likely scrutinise more transactions across more products (with many focusing on predicting risk using mule-specific AI algorithms), launderers appear to be dispersing their targets.

“It’s clear that long term customer monitoring that leverages real time fraud intelligence, is increasingly necessary to detect the moment ‘good customers’ turn bad.”

The impact of AI emerges in ID fraud filings.

The report also takes a closer look at the impact of identity fraud on the industry, including the most common manifestations.

According to the latest data, ID fraud is the main ‘growth fraud typology’ in the UK at this time. Reasons for fraud filings linked to this category include addresses not matching with provided identities, multiple applications using the same address, and the use of false identities – including suspected and confirmed cases of artificially created ‘synthetic IDs’.

Chris Lewis, Head of Solutions at Synectics, said: “There’s been a 25% increase in ‘false identity’ reports, this growth almost certainly linked to increased adoption of AI tools by fraudsters – tools which make light work of creating synthetic identities and manipulating genuine ones. We predicted the rise of synthetic IDs in 2023 and see their use in full force today”.

While the increase in reported ID fraud may be alarming, it is also indicative that evolving fraud detection tactics are working.

Chris added: “Encouragingly, banks and building societies are intercepting more identity fraud. However, as image and video manipulation advance, fraudsters will keep investing in these tactics. Organisations must stay vigilant, adopting ID verification that moves from 2+2 checks to using diverse digital evidence to confirm someone is and lives where claimed.”

Clear cost-of-living symptoms.

Credit card fraud, application fraud, and mortgage fraud are also examined in the report – with data across all three indicating the that cost-of-living crisis remains a critical factor in UK fraud rates.

More frequent changes of address and conflicting employment details are just some of the areas discussed, the latter increasing by 7.3% in cases of reported application fraud.

As Synectics Fraud Strategy Consultant Jordan Roberts points out, “pressures connected to the cost-of-living crisis may potentially influence an individual’s decisions regarding fraud and financial risk taking”, and this seems evident in the latest data.