Security1 publisher3 min readPublished Updated
BioCatch counts a 258% rise in employment scam victims at more than 370 banks
BioCatch says employment scam victims rose 258% in a year at more than 370 banks in 21 countries, against 35% growth for all reported scams. Nine in ten scam sessions now start on a phone, so the signs of a coached victim have to be read inside the mobile session.
The Watch · Security desk
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What happened
- Investment scams remained the costliest, averaging $6,600 a case, nearly five times the average across all scam types.
- In one scam session BioCatch dissected, the victim typed a new payee's account number in groups of three digits, a pattern it ties to reading numbers aloud on a call.
- After in-app warnings, that customer hit back on the review screen and dropped the transfer before the bank had requested a risk score.
- FinCEN has counted at least 36 U.S. teenagers who died by suicide since 2021 in cases linked to financial sextortion.
- Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission arrested 792 people, 148 of them Chinese nationals, at a scam operation in a seven-story Victoria Island building in December 2024.
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Why it matters
- constraint A control that waits for an active phone call would miss about 70% of reported voice-scam activity, so call detection cannot carry scam defense on its own.
- decision Ranking scam types by victim growth puts employment scams first, while ranking by loss per case still puts investment scams first, so a fraud team has to choose which measure sets its priorities.
- exposure Banks that score only outgoing payments leave mule accounts unwatched, and West says those accounts take money in and push it out in a single sitting.
BioCatch's counts come from scam reports filed by the banks and financial firms that run its fraud-detection software [3]. On those numbers, employment scam victims grew about seven times as fast as reported scams overall [1]. Romance scams grew slowest, with victims up 23% [8]. Purchase scams stayed the most common, at almost a third of cases, and carried the lowest average value in each of the four regions the researchers broke out [7].
Unauthorized fraud, where a criminal works the account without the owner's help, starts on mobile in 75% of cases [5]. Scam sessions run 15 points higher [4]. In the scam session BioCatch dissected, which lasted about 15 minutes, the account owner was the one setting up the transfer [9][12]. The customer logged in on an active phone call with remote access software installed [9]. On the account overview pages, the customer sat almost idle for two minutes [11]. The payment went to a first-time beneficiary for an amount well outside the customer's history, and touch events piled up in one spot on the review screen [13].
The researchers argue the customer had to reach the decision to stop alone, because victims told they are being scammed often push back [15]. Scammers prepare them for the bank's call, according to the researchers: "The bank will try to stop you. Don't listen to them. They don't understand." [15]
The investment-scam average implies an all-scam average a little above $1,300 [2]. The report's per-case loss figures cover investment and purchase scams, and it does not give an average case value for employment scams [5].
Erin West, a former prosecutor who founded Operation Shamrock, spent time in Nigeria in July [16]. She says scam compound networks are already there [16]. The older, homegrown fraud she saw runs on gift cards, wire transfers, Venmo, Cash App and peer-to-peer payments split into small amounts [18]. The money lands in mule accounts, including fintech wallets that take little more than a phone number to open [18]. In financial sextortion, a scammer talks a boy, usually 13 to 17, into sending a compromising photo, then demands $100, $200 or a gift card [19]. NCMEC now logs 137 financial sextortion reports a day [21]. West calls the FinCEN suicide count a floor because it covers only U.S. reports [20]. "Boys are dying over amounts of money no monitoring system was ever built to notice," West wrote [22].
West says recovery is possible when banks watch the receiving side [23]. One Nigerian investigator took an American police report on a pig butchering loss of about $50,000 and traced the money through five bank accounts to two trucks bought with the proceeds [24]. He impounded the trucks and filed for civil forfeiture. The case is still on appeal [24].
What to watch
- An average case value for employment scams from BioCatch would show whether the 258% victim growth carries losses to match.
- The appeal in the Nigerian civil forfeiture case over two trucks traced from a roughly $50,000 pig-butchering loss.
- Whether banks extend payment scoring to incoming funds on mule-pattern accounts, as West asks.