A SURGE in digital fraud involving online deliveries, parcels, and cash-on-delivery (COD) transactions last year exposed logistics as the country’s most scam-prone sector, according to a study by credit reporting agency TransUnion.
Data from the company’s H1 2026 Top Fraud Trends Report showed that logistics suffered the highest suspected digital fraud rate among industries in the Philippines in 2025 at 8.5 percent, higher than the 6 percent in 2024.
“Recent cases of fake delivery and COD scams, in which victims are induced to pay for items they did not order or were misrepresented, underscore how fraudsters are exploiting delivery and last-mile touchpoints,” the report said.
Other vulnerable sectors were insurance (7.6 percent), online communities (5.8 percent), retail (5.2 percent), financial services (2.3 percent), travel-related industries (0.8 percent), and telecommunications (0.6 percent).
“The latest data from TransUnion shows that fraud risks are present across sectors, affecting consumers at multiple points in their digital journeys,” TransUnion Philippines chief commercial officer Yogesh Daware said.
“In addition to strengthening digital onboarding, device validation and network intelligence within individual organizations, this underscores the need for collaborations beyond single entities,” Daware added.
The country ranks among the world’s most digitally engaged economies, driven by strong mobile connectivity and high internet usage. This has expanded opportunities for online commerce, but has also widened the attack surface for cybercriminals operating across multiple sectors.
For the sixth consecutive year, the Philippines recorded an overall suspected digital fraud rate of 4.1 percent in 2025, above the global average of 3.8 percent.
Around 72 percent of surveyed Filipinos said they were targeted by digital fraud attempts between August and December last year through online platforms, emails, text messages, or phone calls. This was higher than the global average of 53 percent, again placing the Philippines among the markets with the highest levels of digital fraud exposure across 18 countries and regions included in the study.
Despite the scale of exposure, financial losses were comparatively smaller than global levels. About 38 percent of Filipino consumers reported losing money to digital fraud in 2025, with median losses reaching $850 or approximately P50,000. This was below the global median loss of $1,671.
Phishing attacks accounted for 45 percent of incidents, followed by smishing or fraudulent text messages at 38 percent, and scams involving third-party sellers on legitimate e-commerce websites at 28 percent.
Fraud risk was most concentrated at the account login stage, where the suspected fraud rate reached 6.1 percent, above the global average of 4.3 percent, the report said, noting that account creation had a fraud rate of 4.5 percent, while financial transactions stood at 1.1 percent.
The prevalence of phishing and impersonation scams shows that fraud in the country is increasingly becoming an identity and authentication issue, especially as fraudsters use artificial intelligence and synthetic identities to evade detection, Daware said.
“This raises critical questions for businesses and consumers: whether organizations can reliably verify the person on the other side of a digital interaction and whether consumers can effectively protect their personal information,” Daware noted.
