"The Returns Process Has Become a Blind Spot." Retailers Built It Themselves.

"The returns process has become a blind spot for retailers." That is not a warning from a rival vendor. It is ReBound Returns describing its own industry, after analysing a million returned orders and finding 3.9% of them fraudulent, an estimated £29 million in losses.

The line that follows the quote is the real story. Wouter ten Heggeler, ReBound's product manager, explained why the blind spot exists: "Investment in fraud prevention is focused almost entirely on the point of purchase." Retailers did not fail to notice returns fraud. They built the blind spot, by pointing every defence at the checkout and leaving the door behind it wide open.

How Big Is the Returns Fraud Problem, Really?

Big enough to average 3.9% of all returns, and considerably higher in some markets. ReBound's Returns Fraud Playbook, drawn from a million orders between July 2025 and May 2026, found fraud rates reaching 6.6% in Poland and 5.3% in Denmark. Total estimated losses across the sample: £29 million.

That is not a rounding error inside a returns department. With online return rates now approaching 20% of sales and the US returns market alone worth roughly $850 billion, a fraud rate sitting at nearly 4% and climbing in places to over 6% represents a genuinely large, genuinely growing hole in retail margins, hiding inside a process most businesses treat as routine.

Can You Actually Spot a Fraudulent Return?

There is at least one clear tell, and it is timing, not appearance. ReBound found that customers behind potentially fraudulent returns kept the product for a median of 18 days before sending it back, against 9.5 days for genuine returns. The fraudulent return is not the fast, honest change of mind. It is the item quietly used, tested, or worn for over two and a half weeks before it comes back.

The other detail is procedural, not behavioural: refunds are frequently issued before the returned item is even physically inspected. That is not a security gap so much as an operational one, refund speed prioritised over refund certainty, and it means many fraudulent returns are paid out before anyone has looked at what actually came back.

Why Did This Become a Blind Spot in the First Place?

Because retailers pointed their defences at the wrong end of the transaction. For two decades, "fraud prevention" meant stopping stolen cards and fake identities before a sale completed. ten Heggeler's quote names the consequence directly: investment stayed at the point of purchase while a large and measurable risk built up on the other side of it, in the process nobody was watching.

This is not a new observation in isolation, it echoes what merchants have told other researchers all year. We covered the same pre-purchase versus post-purchase divide in There Are Two Kinds of Retail Fraud, and ReBound's data is a fresh, independent confirmation from inside the returns process itself: the money and attention went one way, and the fraud went the other.

Why Doesn't Inspecting Returns Harder Fix It?

Because the signal that actually separates a fraudulent return from a genuine one is often invisible in the parcel itself. An 18-day hold and a 9.5-day hold can look identical once the box is opened. And even where a pattern like slow returns is visible, it only tells one retailer about its own customers. It says nothing about whether the same person is doing this at nine other retailers at once, which is exactly the blind spot behind almost every fraud pattern we have covered, including in The Serial Returner No Single Shop Can See.

Fixing the returns blind spot, in other words, is not just about looking at returns more closely. It is about looking at the claimant across more than one retailer, so a pattern that is faint inside a single business becomes obvious across the network. That is the outcome we describe in Fewer False Positives, Faster Claims.

The Blind Spot Was a Choice

ReBound's own framing is the most useful part of this report: the returns process did not become a blind spot by accident. It became one because every pound of fraud-prevention budget for twenty years went to the front door.

The £29 million figure, and the far higher rates in some markets, is the bill for that choice. It will keep growing for as long as fraud investment stays parked at the checkout while the actual risk sits, mostly unwatched, on the other side of every sale.