More than one in ten newly observed merchants encountered fraud within their first 90 days, according to analysis from transaction-risk business Fraudio.
The company examined more than 127.5 million transactions made between January 2025 and April 2026. Its new-merchant cohort covered 3,923 businesses whose first recorded transaction appeared during 2025.
Fraudio said 10.5 per cent recorded at least one fraud-labelled transaction during their first 90 days. Among those affected, the median time to first fraud was 33 days, while almost half encountered it within 30 days.
The fraud rate per transaction was 2.9 times higher during merchants’ first 90 days than among payment programmes more than a year old.
Individual payments did not necessarily look unusual. Fraudio found that 82 per cent of fraudulent transactions appeared ordinary when assessed only by their amount, currency and payment channel. The equivalent figure for legitimate transactions was 84 per cent.
Historical links proved more revealing. Across the wider dataset, 30 per cent of fraudulent transactions involved a card already connected to earlier fraud, compared with 0.075 per cent of legitimate transactions.
Fraudio cautioned that this comparison is retrospective because fraud can be confirmed through chargebacks after the original payment.
The findings suggest that newer merchants and their payment providers may face elevated risk before they have built enough transaction history to define normal customer behaviour.
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