Phishing fraud in Switzerland: cases rise by 15 per cent in 2025
Phishing remains the most common fraud scheme in Switzerland. Enquiries to the banking ombudsman regarding payment fraud increased by 253 per cent over four years.
Phishing wave continues – banking ombudsman records record figures
Phishing emails, fake SMS messages and fraudulent calls have increased again in Switzerland in 2025. According to srf.ch, fraud cases rose by 15 per cent overall – and phishing remains by far the criminals' preferred method. Over the course of four years, the number of enquiries to the Swiss Banking Ombudsman concerning fraud schemes in payment transactions increased by 253 per cent.
In phishing, passwords, log-in details or account information are obtained through fake emails, SMS messages or bogus calls. Banking Ombudsman Andreas Barfuss explains the persistence of this method quite simply: "You can send out countless emails – and perhaps one in a million people will respond to it." The scheme costs the perpetrators nothing and still pays off.
2575 cases, 98 per cent of banks follow recommendations
The ombudsman's office under Andreas Barfuss handled a total of 2575 cases in the past year – 100 more than in the previous year. In 319 cases, it intervened directly with the relevant financial institution, and in 174 cases, concrete solutions were proposed. Banks followed the recommendations in 98 per cent of cases and accommodated the affected customers.
The main cause of complaints remained fraud cases related to card payments and online banking.
Artificial intelligence makes criminals' work easier
Barfuss does not expect fraud figures to fall in the future – particularly because of the use of artificial intelligence. With artificial intelligence, the voices of relatives, police officers or IT support staff can be imitated deceptively authentically in order to extort money through fake calls.
At the same time, artificial intelligence is also changing the work of the ombudsman's office itself: an increasing number of defrauded bank customers have their complaints formulated by artificial intelligence tools instead of contacting them by telephone. Whilst these submissions are often linguistically and argumentatively elegant, they are legally weak, according to the ombudsman's office. It is often unclear what sources the argumentation is based on – and it is often derived from foreign law. Barfuss describes the internal investigations as "treasure hunts".
There is a further problem: "Artificial intelligence has a bias: it wants to please the user. And so it may raise expectations that cannot then be met," says Barfuss. This increases the conflict potential between complainants and banks – and thus the workload of the ombudsman's office.
Millions for rightful owners of dormant assets
In his role as a point of contact for dormant assets, the banking ombudsman received 460 new search enquiries in 2025. During this time, 33 dormant customer relationships with account and deposit values totalling 12.1 million Swiss francs were made accessible to the rightful persons – in addition to seven safe deposit boxes.
Since the introduction of this system in 2001, the office has identified a total of 772 such customer relationships and transferred assets worth 157.3 million Swiss francs and the contents of 82 safe deposit boxes to rightful persons.
Source: Google News CH — Crime (de)