Stolen credit cards are not the goldmine that author assumes they are. The big money nowadays is in crypto fraud (YouTube scam video's, hacks, fake customer service, etc.).
94% of gold mining is outside the US (because mining is hard, dangerous work, because it's often environmentally devastating, and because the US industrialized early and so has depleted its natural resources), so US gold mine production is not very relevant. Worldwide gold mining is about 3200 tonnes per year, so about US$190 billion. I guess you could say that US$25B is on the scale of US$190B, since it's smaller by less than an order of magnitude?
But the person you were replying to wasn't saying that payments fraud wasn't huge. They were saying that the bulk of payments fraud was no longer stolen credit cards, because now payments fraud happens mostly with cryptocurrencies. I have no idea if their point is correct, but I think you weren't really addressing it.
If only there were a publishing house that cared an irrational amount about financial infrastructure, but where would one ever find that?
(No seriously speaking, would love to write a book someday, but not sure it would be this book, and between the day job and two young children I don't have a book in me at the moment unless I can clean the calendar for many months in a row and that doesn't seem rational given other uses of my calendar.)
What does this mean? Are we breaking payments fraud down by countries? Continents? Currencies? Those can all have different "pluralities". There is no lower limit on what "the plurality of $25B" is.
There is no way to conveniently do "select sum(payment_amount) where country = 'US' AND was_fraudy from the_global_economy" but it's broadly estimated at +/- $10B, which is why why I said it was on the scale the gold mining industry, which I quoted. You're welcome to Google various estimates, though they'll end up over the map in the low 10 digits region.
The US usually gets attributed something like 40-60% of the value of global capital markets, so it seems to me a reasonable default assumption that it has a similar ratio of payments fraud, or illegal drugs, or whatever economic sector you might choose. Very likely a plurality, very possibly not a majority.
The author is literally writing about his lived experiences, he not assuming anything, just describing what he’s seen.
Having worked in a similar role, I can tell you he’s spot on. Payment fraud is huge and pervasive, especially in the US where the industry has found a way of shifting most of the cost on to consumers.
