For the airline industry, fraud has been a long-term challenge. Going all the way back to 2020, an IATA white paper on fraud drew on sources showing that airlines are criminals’ favorite targets for fraud. The news isn’t all bad — some research shows a notable dip in airline fraud worldwide in 2025 — but overall, the industry remains vulnerable to attack on many fronts. Most notably, fraud involving stolen data, synthetic fraud schemes, and account takeovers, fueled by the rise of generative AI, is a challenge the industry is still grappling with.
Regulators and law enforcement have a role to play, but ultimately it’s the carriers who are positioned to stop fraud at the earliest stages. That 2020 IATA white paper’s subtitle read “Why carriers need to think of themselves as crimefighters.” That assessment was bluntly accurate then, and it is still so now.
Let’s look at how data patterns connected to travelers and transactions can help reveal fraud activity.
The Airline Industry’s Vulnerability to Fraud is Structural
The air travel industry’s status as a major target of fraud isn’t surprising, because the industry’s vulnerabilities are built in. Even relatively small carriers operate across multiple jurisdictions, and major airlines operate across multiple nations and continents. Bookings, loyalty programs, refunds, and disputes or chargebacks are typically all handled by separate teams. Bookings are subdivided further, with tickets selling through channels including direct sales from the carriers themselves, travel agents, online travel sites, and independent brokers.
All of those touch points create vulnerabilities. Remote-purchase options for tickets are popular with consumers because of their convenience, and with criminals because they’re easy to conduct with stolen cards or falsified customer information. Brokers and agents may themselves defraud the carriers, or fraudsters can steal their credentials to use in the commission of fraud.
Finally — because the threats are distributed, and carriers’ teams are siloed by function — it’s difficult for airlines to identify large-scale patterns of fraud or recurrent abuse of their refund and dispute processes.
Data Patterns Are the Crucial Through-Line in Fraud
One effective way to address airline fraud is to focus on patterns across traveler and transaction data. In each case, a given set of traveler data points — such as booking details, contact records, and payment information — is used to perpetrate the fraud, file a false dispute, or abuse the refund system.
Shared data patterns can help investigators connect related fraud cases and surface underlying patterns. Carriers’ existing fraud prevention systems struggle to do that, unfortunately, in part because systems and personnel are siloed off from each other, and in part because transaction-level and payments tools are too narrowly focused to catch offenders consistently. As long as the traveler data they present is persuasive enough to withstand a cursory check, criminals can exploit the gaps in carriers’ security systems continuously.
Data Enrichment Can Support Fraud Investigations and Improve Service
The industry as a whole has a strong need for better data enrichment and broader contextual signals. The distinction between the two is important but not necessarily intuitive, so let’s take a brief look at the differences.
Initial fraud screening typically relies on transaction checks and internal account data. When those signals raise questions, additional contextual data sources can help investigators review whether the activity appears consistent.
Data enrichment, on the other hand, is more complex but also more rewarding. Enrichment aims to fill in the blanks, providing deeper and broader information than carriers would ordinarily have in their systems. This might include previously unknown phone numbers or emails, updated or former addresses, or even social media accounts. The additional information is frequently useful for investigative context when reviewing flagged activity, especially in situations where lower-level tools yield inconclusive or ambivalent results.
Improved Data Tools can Uncover Fraud Without Adding Friction
The level of enriched data we just discussed won’t be found in carriers’ own files. Legacy data vendors, dependent on relatively slow-moving data sources such as credit bureaus and government databases, can also struggle to consistently provide rich, real-time data. That creates a need in the market for modern, agile tools like Spokeo for Business, which provide the deeper, updated data that can support faster fraud investigations.
Spokeo’s databases include billions of data points from a wide range of public record and commercially sourced public datasets. Once your existing tools flag a transaction as questionable, it takes just moments to review additional contextual data about the transaction or traveler. In the case of a fraud scheme, for example, Spokeo’s search results will quickly show if the key data elements associated with a transaction for a given traveler are associated with different names, a strong indicator that further investigation may be warranted. Geographic and other inconsistencies can be equally useful in uncovering conventional impersonation fraud.
The biggest advantage of a tool like Spokeo for Business is its ability to “un-silo” data from across bookings, loyalty programs, refunds, and other points of contact between carriers and users. Spokeo can integrate with all of those systems through its powerful application programming interface (API), providing your teams with the ability to investigate flagged activities, highlight patterns across related accounts, and help teams review suspicious activity more efficiently. The end result is fast, friction-free service for legitimate clients, and a sharp improvement in your ability to fight fraud.
Upgrading Your Workflows
Despite the reported drop in airline fraud over the course of 2025, it is difficult to imagine a short-term future in which the risk of fraud does anything other than grow. As generative AI models become increasingly capable, it’s trivially easy for criminals to create synthetic fraud profiles at scale, and AI can often even defeat biometric authentication.
Embedding Spokeo for Business into your workflows can help airlines support fraud investigation and transaction review workflows across a range of fraud scenarios. Reach out today to learn more.
Spokeo for Business provides access to public record and commercially sourced data that may support fraud investigation and transaction review workflows. It is not a consumer reporting agency as defined by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and does not provide consumer reports. Customers are responsible for ensuring their use of the data complies with all applicable laws and regulations.
Sources
International Air Travel Association (IATA): Fraud In the Airline Industry
Accertify: Airline Fraud Rates are Dropping — but New Risks are Still Emerging
TechTarget: Biometric Privacy and Security Challenges to Know