This quarterly fraud intelligence report analyzes February–April 2026 signals across 12+ countries, highlighting five emerging fraud trends and a more coordinated, industrialized model of social engineering built around exploiting trust at scale.

Report Fraud is the UK’s new national service for cybercrime and fraud reporting, replacing Action Fraud in England, Wales and Northern Ireland with a modern contact centre, online tool, and stronger victim support.

Artificial intelligence is moving from passive analysis to autonomous agents. Agentic AI describes systems capable of making decisions, initiating actions, and pursuing goals with minimal human input. While this offers huge efficiency gains, it also introduces complex cyber fraud and security risks. What is Agentic AI? Traditional AI models classify data or generate responses when prompted. Agentic AI goes further: it plans, adapts and interacts with systems and people to complete tasks. Examples include: Automated trading agents Customer service bots with payment access Shopping agents that can find the best deals and help the user do their shopping or book a holiday Potential benefits More efficient trading across multiple platforms. Reduction in customer service response times and wait times. Faster bookings at relatively cheaper prices. Fraud and Security Risks Autonomy Without Oversight: Agents may act beyond intended parameters, causing financial detriment. Adversarial Manipulat

Universities can better protect students from rising fraud by recognizing common scams around housing, job searches, and phishing. The post explains why students are vulnerable and where campus risks often appear.

It’s that time of year again - when online shopping peaks, deliveries pile up, and inboxes fill with shipping updates. Unfortunately, it’s also prime time for fraudsters. In the weeks surrounding major retail events like Black Friday and Christmas, delivery scams spike dramatically. The perfect storm for scammers Every year, billions of legitimate parcels are shipped across the UK. In 2024 alone, Royal Mail processed over 4.2 billion parcels. Fraudsters exploit this activity by sending fake text messages and emails claiming to be from couriers such as Royal Mail, DPD, Evri or Amazon. These messages often contain a short link asking recipients to pay a small redelivery fee - usually between £1.99 and £3.99 - or to “confirm delivery details”. While the amount seems trivial, these scams are designed to harvest card details, personal data and sometimes install malware. Once details are captured, victims may be targeted by further scams or unauthorised transactions. How delivery scams have

Explains why fraud is now a cross-functional risk and introduces Fraud OS, a connected model for combining people, processes, technology, and intelligence to close gaps in fraud operations and financial crime defence.