GASA report: Danish scam losses hit kr10.1 billion as banks catch more fraud

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, nearly three in four Danish adults, 74%, encountered a scam in the past year, up from 67% in 2025. The State of Scams Denmark 2026 report, developed with Punktum dk, is based on research among 2,210 adults living in Denmark and estimates that scams cost Danish consumers kr10.1 billion over the past year.

The report also found that banks and payment providers are catching more of the fraud themselves, before victims notice anything wrong. Nearly half of victims, 49%, discovered they had been scammed because someone or something else told them, up from 35% in 2025. Of those alerts, 29% of victims said their bank or payment provider was the one that flagged it.

What the numbers show

The rise in bank-led detection is the clearest shift in the data. A year ago, most victims had to notice fraud themselves. Now, close to one in three victims owes their discovery to a bank's own systems catching something irregular, rather than to the victim spotting it. That is a measurable change in who finds the scam first.

It matters because confidence in spotting scams has not translated into fewer losses. Despite 73% of Danish adults saying they are confident they can recognize a scam, 74% encountered one anyway, an average of 96 scam encounters per person each year. Among those who encountered a scam, 38% interacted with it, and one in four of those who interacted had money stolen, either by giving it directly to a scammer or by sharing personal information that was later used to steal money.

Those who lost money reported an average loss of kr33,614. More than half of victims, 55%, were scammed more than once in the past 12 months, with an average of 2.4 incidents each. Being scammed affected the mental wellbeing of 62% of victims.

What this changes

For a Danish reader, the practical shift is this: a fraud alert from a bank is no longer a rare backstop, it is becoming one of the main ways people find out they have been scammed at all. Jorij Abraham, GASA's Managing Director, said awareness remains essential but needs to be supported by stronger prevention and intervention from the organisations across the scam journey. Jakob Truelsen, CEO of Punktum dk A/S, said the nature of fraud has changed, that fewer people fall for simple tricks now, and that the cases which do succeed cost far more, pointing to professional, sophisticated methods behind them.

Reporting losses does not guarantee recovery. Among victims who reported their losses, 44% had at least some money returned.

The report points to a system where catching fraud increasingly depends on a bank noticing first. A reader who waits to notice a problem themselves is relying on the slower of the two routes.