UPI Goes Global: What Borderless Instant Payments Mean for Fraud Teams

Real-time payments are one of the key forces shaping the modern payments landscape.

While “faster payments mean faster fraud” has become one of the industry’s most repeated observations, the next challenge is already taking shape as real-time payment networks increasingly connect across borders.

Few developments illustrate this shift better than the rapid international expansion of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

UPI: A Prime Example of Instant Payments Going Cross-Border

UPI is an instant payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and regulated by the Reserve Bank of India. Launched in 2016, it enables real-time account-to-account transfers for both peer-to-peer (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) payments through a simple mobile interface available 24/7.

Its speed, convenience, open architecture, and interoperability—allowing people to use a single app to transact with customers of any participating bank—quickly fueled UPI’s popularity. This is especially evident in its cross-border growth.

In 2022, the system processed just 180 international transactions. By 2024, that number had risen to 37,000. In 2025, it jumped to more than 755,000—a 20-fold increase in a single year. In the first four months of 2026 alone, UPI processed over 600,000 cross-border transactions. The payment system is already live or has announced partnerships in more than 10 countries across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

The Fraud Reality Behind UPI’s Growth

UPI’s success (today accounting for around 85% of all digital payments in India) inevitably draws attention to the challenges that come with it, fraud risks being among the most pressing.

Data from India shows how fraud has grown alongside UPI adoption. Reported losses more than quadrupled between FY2021–22 and FY2023–24, while fraud cases continued to rise into 2025, surpassing one million in the first eight months of the financial year alone.

It’s important to note that the most common fraud types affecting UPI are rooted in social engineering, including phishing, impersonation scams, remote-access fraud, and other forms of authorized push payment (APP) fraud. This suggests that the challenge lies not in the technical security of UPI itself, but in cybercriminals exploiting the system’s speed and convenience to deceive victims and move funds.

The Lesson from FedNow

Fraud threats stemming from real-time payments are not unique to India. Similar concerns accompanied the launch of other instant payment systems, including the FedNow Service in the United States.

As payment speed increased, fraud prevention teams were forced to rethink established detection and response strategies. Controls designed for slower payment environments proved less effective when decisions had to be made in seconds.

The most notable response has been a growing emphasis on shared fraud intelligence. In the United States, recent FedNow developments provide participating institutions with network-level fraud signals before payments are sent. India is also beginning to move in a similar direction through collaborative AI initiatives aimed at identifying mule accounts.

Europe’s forthcoming Payment Services Regulation (PSR) takes the same principle even further by requiring payment service providers to exchange fraud-related information.

Borderless Payments Require Borderless Visibility

As instant payment networks expand across borders, so does the attack surface facing fraud teams. Criminals can exploit a wider network of institutions, accounts, users, and payment corridors to commit fraud and move illicit funds.

Sharing fraud intelligence is increasingly considered one of the most effective responses to real-time and cross-border fraud. Why?

Real-time and cross-border payment systems change the rules of fraud prevention. Banks cannot compensate for limited visibility with time anymore. Manual reviews, delayed settlement, and lengthy fraud investigations become increasingly toothless in a world where stolen funds can move across institutions and jurisdictions in seconds.

The only way to regain control is through better intelligence—which increasingly means intelligence that extends beyond your own institution.

Shared intelligence brings several benefits to anti-fraud efforts:

1. Earlier Detection of Mule Accounts and Scam Networks

A single bank only sees a fragment of criminal activity. When intelligence is shared, institutions can identify mule accounts, suspicious recipients, and emerging scam patterns much earlier. This broader visibility can significantly improve detection rates. In ThreatMark’s experience, a fraud intelligence network enables up to 4x higher mule detection.

2. Faster Response and Fraud Interdiction

Real-time payments mean that once funds leave an institution, recovery rates are typically very low. Shared intelligence enables real-time warnings, faster case escalation, quicker investigations, and intervention before funds are withdrawn or laundered.

3. Better Fraud Detection Accuracy

Shared intelligence provides signals that individual institutions do not possess. This leads to more accurate risk assessments, stronger detection models, and better fraud outcomes overall. For example, ThreatMark’s Fraud Intelligence [KM[2] achieves 76% precision in identifying mule accounts.

4. Lower False Positives

One of the biggest costs in fraud prevention is investigating legitimate customers who happen to trigger risk rules. Shared intelligence helps distinguish normal customer behavior from genuine threats. This leads to fewer unnecessary alerts and less friction for customers.

5. Stronger Protection Against APP Scams

APP scams often involve accounts at multiple institutions. Shared intelligence can help uncover APP fraud activity and provide a much broader view of the attack chain than any individual institution can obtain alone.

6. Greater Visibility Into Cross-Border Fraud

As payment systems become increasingly interconnected, fraud rarely stops at national borders. Extending fraud intelligence across jurisdictions helps institutions identify international mule networks before stolen funds disappear.

Fraud Has Already Gone Global

UPI’s international expansion reflects a broader shift in global payments. Consumers increasingly expect to move money instantly, seamlessly, and across borders. The fact that nearly 60% of global online shoppers already buy from retailers outside their home country is a fitting example of this trend.

As payments become both instant and international, fraud—as opportunistic as ever—will inevitably follow the same path. Criminal networks already operate across institutions and jurisdictions, exploiting the limited visibility available to individual banks.

Frontline experience from real-time payment systems around the world and emerging regulatory initiatives point in the same direction: combating increasingly coordinated fraud requires equally coordinated defenses. Shared intelligence, cross-institutional visibility, and real-time collaboration are becoming essential capabilities for protecting the next generation of digital payments.

The institutions that prepare fraud defenses ahead of rollout, not after, avoid becoming a soft target.

Ready to secure borderless instant payments? Talk to our fraud experts.