Statistics of The Boston Consulting Group from 2022 confirm the growth of non-cash payments in the world over the past ten years: worldwide growth is 13.6% since 2010, and the statistics for North America averaged 3.2% per year, 5% - for the European region. 

And the driving force of transaction growth in the European region is Germany: the number of cashless card transactions per person in Germany from 2010 to 2022 increased 30-fold, making Germany the world leader in the number of secure tokenized transactions.

This was facilitated by the rapid technological growth of the banking sector, an easier adaptation of contactless mobile payments using Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other similar applications, the spread of e-commerce platforms, and the absence of the burden of "traditionalism" when choosing a technology platform. Thus, Germany has become the largest market in Europe regarding the volume of transactions using digital wallets.

The rapid spread of non-cash payments introduces legitimate information security risks into the financial sphere.

They are related to the payment process's organization, the loss of financial company control over it, and the risk of fraud through users of payment systems. This is why many companies are trying to comply with the security standards of small business pci compliance https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/blog/posts/pci-compliance-for-small-businesses.

To minimize the risks in the process of payments organization, there are several regulatory authorities and obligatory standards which every transaction participant must comply with to a certain extent.

The main difficulty is that from the system's point of view, fraudulent payments can meet all the requirements to confirm the voluntary intent of the user. And fraud schemes aimed at users with payment data have developed into full-fledged social engineering in recent years.

Various methods to mislead the user are used. Thus, according to the FBI data collected from known incidents around the world, by the end of 2022 the following trends can be observed in terms of social engineering:

The most commonly used social fraud scenarios include: advance payment schemes, investment fraud schemes, romance cheating, deceptive tech support, exploitation of the grandchildren theme, government cheating, charity, lottery cheating, home repair, TV/radio cheating, and kinship and guardianship cheating.

Under the pretext of various situations, scammers convince the user to voluntarily give up bank card details or dictate confirmation codes that come in and thus carry out fraudulent transfers.

The great volume of complaints comes from victims over 60 years old (it is a voluntary statistic, so the data is estimated) - about 68000 complaints for $835 mln of damage.

The number of so-called "Tech Support Fraud" - exploitation of users' trust in technical support - is actively growing. An intruder presents himself as a professional in a company's IT service (most often a travel agency or a financial company) and, under the pretext of protecting funds, convinces the user to provide data to transfer funds to a "safe" account. For 2022, complaints came from 48 countries, with an estimated loss of $54 million, showing a 40% increase over the previous year.