Visa warns that fraudsters are now using artificial intelligence (AI) to make scams more subtle, sophisticated, and effective.
In a new interview with PYMNTS, Dustin White, vice president of risk products and solutions at Visa DPS, says fraudsters are launching new forms of attack to engage victims well before any transaction.
According to White, scammers use AI-powered tools to harvest data about their targets before launching personalized attacks using text, emails, and other forms of digital content, while discovering other methods of compromise.
“Fraudster tactics to compromise funds start well before the transaction occurs.”
The Visa executive also warns that the fraudsters are ahead of financial institutions because the thieves are actively sharing data.
“Fraudsters democratize intelligence better than anybody. And financial institutions often don’t.”
With the evolution of fraud methods, White says that banks and credit unions are at a disadvantage, as they tend to wait until the funds are already on the move.
“Transactional fraud mitigation tools are absolutely a core foundational layer of security. So, they’re not going away. But… trying to stop all of that at the transactional level is sort of a big ask…
If you’re waiting until the monetization layer, you’re really not engaging with fraudsters in the battlefield that they’re in day to day,”
White notes that by the time fraud reaches the monetization stage, criminals have often built trust with victims through schemes like romance scams. Even when banks flag suspicious transfers, stopping them can be difficult because victims remain under the scammer’s influence.
“A fraudster has had a couple hours, a couple days, maybe a couple weeks to build a rapport and relationship and trust with the consumer. And now, when you step in at the transactional phase, you are trying to undo all of that trust in a single moment. It’s very hard to do.”
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