U.S. auto lending carried an estimated $10.4 billion in fraud exposure in 2025, a figure the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) cited Monday, Oct. 19, as it warned of higher losses in 2026.
Point Predictive, the lending analytics firm behind the estimate, put exposure at $9.2 billion in 2024. That makes the 2025 figure 13% higher. The estimate measures potential risk, rather than losses already incurred. Its analysis drew on more than 300 million earlier applications representing $5 trillion in consumer loans.
Point Predictive attributed 69% of the 2025 exposure to first-party fraud, which includes false information supplied by borrowers or dealerships. It cited inflated income, inaccurate employment details and groups seeking loans from multiple lenders to obtain vehicles for resale.
NICB also pointed to financing schemes involving invented identities and documents made with artificial intelligence. Its warning projects a rise in vehicle-finance losses in 2026 but gives no numerical forecast.
A separate TransUnion study followed loans issued from March through September 2023 for two years. Among borrowers in prime and higher credit tiers whom its tools flagged for possible synthetic identities, poorly performing loans occurred at 12.5 times the rate seen among other consumers. Average balance losses for flagged borrowers exceeded $22,000. Those results describe the flagged group, not auto borrowers as a whole.
Dealers reported costs of their own. In an Experian survey conducted by HarrisX from Sept. 10 to 29, 2025, 46% of 125 auto-dealer managers said fraudulent transactions typically cost their businesses money when lenders issued chargebacks. In the same poll, 65% estimated that fraud accounted for 5% to 24% of industry auto-loan defaults over the preceding year. Those percentages are dealers’ estimates, not a measured industry default rate.
The financing warning comes as reported vehicle theft falls. NICB counted 268,415 U.S. vehicle thefts in the first half of 2026, down 21% from a year earlier. The bureau said theft totals omit vehicles obtained through fraud or forgery.
