Fraud Forward

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

I first came across Assaf Kipnis through his work online, and more recently he shared a post about realizing he was more than an investigator.

Assaf has spent 13 years in security, trust and safety, and fraud, with investigation roles at LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and ElevenLabs. Today he runs his own consultancy focused on investigations, AI builds, and threat intelligence. In our conversation, he raises a question I hadn’t considered. While we as an industry are debating whether AI will replace fraud investigators, the people committing fraud are using AI to experiment, innovate, and improve their operations. What happens if we remove the very people who help us stay ahead?

We talk about leveraging AI for fraud investigations in a way investigators can actually trust. That includes the AI fraud investigation tools that are being built, why context matters more than hallucinations, what human in the loop really means, and how a fraud knowledge base can keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door. Let’s get into it.

• Why modern fraud operations run like companies, with goals, leaders, and recruiting, and why taking down a thousand accounts doesn’t slow them
• Why replacing fraud investigators with AI could become a competitive disadvantage for fraud teams
• How Assaf built an open source investigation tool that connects OSINT sources and saves evidence to disk
• Why hallucinations are less of a risk than AI making decisions with incomplete or outdated context
• What human in the loop and human on the loop mean in practice, and why reviewing every AI decision doesn’t scale
• Why most of an AI build should be deterministic code, and where a language model earns its place
• How an investigator’s adversarial mindset helps when building with AI, including treating the model like a threat actor
• How a fraud knowledge base captures what experienced investigators know and keeps it after they leave
• What fraud leaders should do instead of bolting AI onto existing processes

• Wonder whether AI will replace fraud investigators, or have been asked to automate investigations
• Lead a fraud team and want a practical path for an AI transformation that keeps your expertise
• Are an investigator or analyst who feels capped by not writing code and want to see what changes with AI
• Want to learn how to build AI fraud investigation tools with guardrails and traceable evidence
• Worry about what happens to your team’s knowledge when experienced people leave

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

We spend a lot of time talking about how scams work. This time we’re talking about how a scam feels while it’s happening to someone, and why one credit union decide that was the most important story to tell.

Amanda Balmer, Director of Financial Crimes at SPECU, has joined me for conversations at conferences before. This is the first time she gets an episode of her own. Amanda leads a team of analysts, investigators, and strategists who protect members. And she’s a big part of why PSECU Fraud Files exists. It’s a video series the credit union built with its marketing team that shares real member stories, anonymized, to help other members spot the warning signs before they lose money.

We dig into why PSECU moved from a newsletter to storytelling while protecting member privacy and dignity, all to build a series that is changing the way members and employees talk about fraud. We also look at the scams hitting credit unions right now, including how a fraudster can coach someone to lie to their own financial institution. If you have ever wondered how a story can treat member education as both an awareness effort and a fraud control, this one is for you.

• How Amanda went from criminal justice student to social worker, private investigator, intelligence analyst, and now director of financial crimes
• How a team of analysts, investigators, and strategists works across PSECU to protect members and the credit union
• Why impostor scams, including bank impersonation scams and one-time passcode scams, are the trend having the biggest impact right now
• How fraudsters coach victims to get around the questions financial institutions ask
• Why PSECU treats member fraud education as both awareness and a fraud control
• How the Fraud Files evolved from a newsletter into fraud awareness videos built around real member stories
• How PSECU approaches anonymizing member fraud stories and takes the shame out of them
• A complete job scam story involving a fake check and a mobile deposit, and the scam red flags it reveals
• What frontline employees can notice in an ordinary conversation, and how these stories have changed internal training and empathy

• Work in credit union fraud prevention and want a model for member education that goes beyond warning lists
• Are thinking about sharing real member stories and need a plan for privacy, marketing, and legal approval
• Lead or train frontline staff and want practical ways to bring fraud prevention into everyday conversations
• Want to understand how job scams, fake checks, and mobile deposit check fraud look from the member’s point of view
• Support scam victims and want language that replaces blame with understanding
• Are trying to build a better working relationship with your marketing team

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

I want to talk about something that might be a little uncomfortable. It isn’t about a new scheme or a criminal using AI to break into a bank. It’s about our own fraud controls, and the gap between having them and knowing they work.

Two stories from the past week made me want to have this conversation. The first is a $350 million penalty against American Express National Bank tied to deficiencies in its BSA and AML program. The second is a guilty plea from a former TD Bank employee who admitted to accepting bribes and helping launder more than $4.8 million. The facts are very different, and neither institution looks like a community bank or credit union with a fraud team of two. Even so, the same questions show up at every size. Does your risk assessment reflect the business you run today? Who reviews the people with the power to override a control? And when someone finds a weakness, who makes sure it gets fixed?

I’m also bringing in what we’ve learned from our financial institution fraud benchmarking research, because it points to a question I keep returning to. What does a mature fraud program actually look like? Let’s get into it.

• Why the American Express enforcement action is a lesson in fraud risk assessment, and what happens when an assessment focuses on a narrow part of a much larger business
• Why the roughly $13 billion in suspected activity cited by the OCC reflects deficiencies in a BSA and AML program, and why it shouldn’t be repeated as a fraud loss
• How a former TD Bank employee allegedly used legitimate access to unblock restricted cards, and why employee override monitoring deserves more attention than it gets
• What 86 accounts at one commercial address teach us about transaction monitoring and what should happen after an alert fires
• Practical ways smaller teams can use compensating controls when they can’t fully separate duties
• Why documenting a known control weakness is not the same as managing it, and how remediation tracking can quietly stall
• A simple framework that separates control existence vs execution vs effectiveness
• Metrics that show real exposure to leadership, beyond alert counts and cases closed
• Five questions to bring to your fraud team on Monday

• Lead or support a fraud program at a community bank or credit union and have to cover a lot of ground with a small team
• Want to know whether your fraud risk assessment is driving decisions or only documenting them
• Are responsible for managing insider risk or employee access and want practical ways to review overrides
• Need help explaining known control weaknesses to leadership in a way that leads to action
• Are comparing your program against peers and want to know what a mature fraud program looks like

What's up fraud fighters and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

I just got home from Las Vegas at four in the morning on Friday after starting the week in Washington DC. I am home for exactly two more sleeps before I turn around and leave again. Today there is no guest. It is just me, my microphone, and a notebook full of things to talk about.

I started the week at HHS then I flew from DC to Vegas for ACAMS The Assembly. Two completely different rooms. Yet I kept writing down versions of the same thing. Culture. Data. Accountability. Collaboration. Speed. Technology.

And then one sentence from Washington ended up framing the entire week for me. Fraud follows money. That is how this episode starts and that is how it ends. Where the money goes, fraud follows. When the money changes, fraud changes. When the way we move money gets faster, fraud gets faster. When we create a new product, somebody figures out how to exploit it. When we close one vulnerability, they find another.

That is fraud driven flows in practice. And if you pay attention to where the money is going next, you will have a much better picture of where the fraud is going.

• Why fraud driven flows connects real-time payments fraud, stablecoin fraud risks, and check fraud in the digital age into one through line
• Government fraud program banking parallels that reframe how we think about audit accountability and corrective action
• Why fraud prevention stewardship and the line a dollar saved is worth more than a dollar recovered should change how we talk to leadership
• How fraud program culture functions as a control and why fraud incentive misalignment quietly defeats everything else we build
• What ACAMS Assembly 2026 insights on real-time payments fraud and stablecoin financial crime risks mean for fraud risk beyond organizational boundary
• Why fraud technology before problem definition is still one of the most expensive mistakes in fraud programs and what AI fraud results measurement should actually look like
• How fraud program single point of failure is a fraud risk hiding inside a staffing conversation
• Why fraud collaboration operationalized looks nothing like fraud collaboration discussed

• Lead a fraud program and have ever felt like you are having the same conversation in completely different rooms
• Are trying to figure out how to measure fraud prevention value and tell a better story to leadership
• Care about fraud program culture and want to hear why it functions as a control, not a soft concept
• Have ever bought technology before understanding the problem you were trying to solve
• Are dealing with fraud knowledge retention risk because one person on your team knows everything and you are not sure what happens when they leave

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

Today I’m sitting in the guest chair.

If you caught the episode of The Saturday Fraud Strategist that dropped alongside this one, you already know Chen Zamir and I decided to swap roles. He came on Fraud Forward to interview me, and I went on his show to interview him. We are heading to Money 20/20 in Vegas together and thought this would be a fun way to kick it off.

I spend a lot of time asking questions. Sitting on the other side of the mic is a different experience, and Chen does not ask easy questions. This conversation went places I did not fully expect. We ended in a discussion about how to build a fraud program that works, and more importantly, what gets in the way.

If you have ever walked into an organization that has been fighting fraud for a year, spent money on vendors and headcount, and still were at the same place you started, this episode is for you. The answer is a lot deeper than adding another tool.

• How to build a fraud program assessment when you walk into an organization that has been struggling and nobody can tell you why
• Why fraud and risk management starts with people, process, technology, and data in that order, and why most organizations start with technology and create more problems
• The fraud capacity planning model I built as a practitioner to prove headcount needs to executives, including the three-minute-per-alert calculation and how to build a 40-hour week model that accounts for everything your team actually does
• Why fraud team structure matters before you can optimize anything, and how to answer the centralized versus decentralized question before you start hiring or buying
• The fraud risk assessment framework I consider the most important tool in a fraud leader's program, including the difference between inherent risk vs residual risk fraud and why a lack of losses does not mean a lack of risk
• Why fraud technology layering done wrong looks like stacking medications that interact badly with each other, and what fraud technology gap analysis actually looks like before a vendor demo
• How authorized push payment fraud breaks the fraud stack that was built around a single question, is this actually our customer, and why scam detection behavioral signals require a completely different approach
• The scam intervention banking framework I used as a practitioner, including targeted friction, cooling off periods, and the phrase I call my mic drop moment
• How I approach fraud executive communication and fraud program advocacy when leadership sees losses on a dashboard and misses the fifteen million the team prevented
• The fraud dashboard reporting model I want to see: attempted fraud, prevented fraud, actual loss, normalized against transaction volume or deposits, not just gross fraud losses
• Why human in the loop fraud AI is not scalable and what human on the loop means for fraud team skill development right now
• Where fraud program maturity actually stands based on the benchmarking work I have been doing, and why fraud teams are doing better than we give ourselves credit for

• Are building or rebuilding a fraud program and want to hear how I actually approach it from the ground up, not a framework from a textbook but the real process I used as a practitioner
• Have ever had to justify headcount, technology, or budget to a leadership team that does not fully understand what fraud prevention actually involves and want a model that makes the case with data
• Work at a bank or credit union and are feeling the pressure of the shift from unauthorized fraud to authorized push payment fraud and scams and are not sure how to adapt your fraud stack
• Want the fraud capacity planning model I built manually as a practitioner, the three-minute-per-alert calculation and the 40-hour week breakdown that finally got leadership to listen
• Are trying to figure out where AI fits in your fraud program without losing the investigators you have spent years developing
• Lead a fraud team and want to know where fraud program maturity actually stands based on the benchmarking work I have been doing across financial institutions
• Have ever walked into a room of blank stares when you asked your team what is actually driving fraud losses and needed a better starting point for that conversation

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

I am bringing you more from here at IAFCI in Nashville. I've caught up with fraud fighters, bank executives, and law enforcement leaders for a rapid-fire soundcheck on where fraud is headed. I've been asking everyone I sit down with the same question. If you had one word to describe fraud in 2026, what would it be? The answers ranged from trending and explosive, to complex, and evolving. Sometimes fraud couldn't be contained by only one word. Honestly, they all fit.

There were so many great conversations this week. They didn't fit into one episode. They barely fit into two. So this episode is a rapid series of conversations covering everything from bust out fraud to elder fraud prevention, dealership schemes, and where IAFCI itself is headed under new leadership. Every one of these conversations left me with something I want to bring straight back to you. These conversations are not just about what we are facing. But also how we can overcome the rising challenges in our community, the tools, the collaboration, and the partnerships between law enforcement and banking that are only getting stronger.

Let's get into it.

• Why bust out fraud is being called a real hot topic right now. How these rings are migrating away from California and Florida as enforcement catches up.
• How auto lending fraud, first party fraud, and income misrepresentation are showing up together. Why leaning on consortium data and application data fraud signals is more important than relying on credit reports alone.
• How dealerships that barely exist are financing cars that were never actually delivered.
• Why business email compromise is still a top concern on the commercial banking side, and the stop call and confirm habit that stops it cold.
• Building a fraud prevention platform started with understanding the problem firsthand by moving into senior living communities.
• A fresh way to think about scam education as a behavior change problem, not just an awareness problem.
• Why check fraud trends remain a serious concern for community bank fraud programs, even as fraudsters increasingly bring AI targeted fraud attacks to smaller institutions.
• How law enforcement bank collaboration through IAFCI industry working groups is turning strangers into the people you call when a case needs to move fast.
• What's ahead for IAFCI itself, including new fraud policy and regulation partnerships and a membership goal of 10,000 by the end of the current term.

• Work in auto lending, dealership finance, or first party fraud detection and want real, current examples of bust out fraud.
• Are on the commercial banking side and want a reminder of how effective stop call and confirm still is against business email compromise.
• Care about elder fraud prevention and want to hear how one approach was built from direct, in-person research.
• Lead fraud or risk at a community bank and want perspective on check fraud trends and AI targeted fraud attacks hitting smaller institutions.
• Believe law enforcement bank collaboration is underrated and want real examples of what that actually looks like in practice.
• Want a fast-moving, one-word-answer kind of episode that still leaves you with real, usable takeaways.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This episode is another one that is unplugged, on the road, and recorded live at IAFCI International in Nashville. I am spending more time talking with the people who fight fraud from every angle. This time we talked about consumer fraud, identity theft, romance scams, account takeover on someone’s personal banking app, and the stuff that leads to the nightly news. But businesses get defrauded too, and when they do, it doesn’t just hit a balance sheet. It hits jobs, it hits communities, yet it barely hits the headlines.

These conversations will hit on a lot, and we will cover one topic that maybe doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. B2B fraud. From business identity verification, synthetic business entities, the regulatory gaps opening up around beneficial ownership, and where AI is genuinely helping instead of just adding to the noise.

Sit down, and let’s get into it with the fraud fighters sounding off on B2B fraud, synthetic entities, and everything AI is changing about the fight ahead.

• Why B2B fraud gets a fraction of the attention consumer fraud does, even though the downstream impact on employees and communities can be just as severe.
• How synthetic business entities and beneficial ownership fraud are becoming easier to pull off, and why recent FinCEN ownership rule changes are widening that gap.
• A real example of business email compromise reaching its highest recorded volume in FinCEN's history, and how compromised business inbox markets let criminals study a company's own email patterns before striking.
• What abandoned identity fraud actually means, criminals exploiting the identities of babies, deceased individuals, and people who simply don't monitor their own credit.
• Why traditional banking fraud vulnerabilities, like slow-moving cross-border wire fraud, are getting overlooked while everyone's attention shifts to AI and crypto.
• A practical framework for proactive fraud detection, including fraud detection beyond login and why the real fight starts before someone ever reaches your app.
• How layered fraud detection stacks and agentic AI fraud tools are being used to catch AI-scaled attacks, including one financial institution that saw 250,000 fraudulent account signups in a matter of days.
• Why IAFCI conference collaboration, a shared conversation, a follow-up call, a number saved after one good conversation, is still one of the most effective fraud-fighting tools out there.

• Work in business banking, commercial lending, or B2B fraud detection and want to hear this category taken seriously.
• Are responsible for business identity verification and want to understand how beneficial ownership fraud is shifting under new FinCEN rules.
• Have been affected by business email compromise or want to understand how compromised business inbox markets actually operate.
• Are building or evaluating layered fraud detection stacks and want real examples of agentic AI fraud tools in production.
• Believe fraud detection beyond login matters as much as anything happening inside your app.
• Want a genuine feel for why IAFCI conference collaboration keeps coming up as fraud fighters' biggest advantage.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This episode is recorded live and unplugged on the conference floor at IAFCI International in Nashville. I couldn’t fit everything I loved into one tidy gathering. Instead I’m bringing you the open floor conversations that, for me, are helping to unravel fraud and are weaving together fraud fighters.

The headliner here is Michael Perez, the first ever fraudster turned fraud fighter to appear on Fraud Forward. What happened in his story is what you’ll want to hear the most. Federal agents recognized he was more valuable teaching fraud prevention than sitting on the sidelines. Beyond Michael’s story is a walk around the conference floor with a retired FBI cyber crime agent turned author, a Postal Inspector on leveraging relationships, an NYPD detective on dismantling large scale fraud schemes tied to money laundering, and two South Carolina Department of Corrections investigators on the sophisticated financial crime investigations happening behind bars.

• Michael Perez's full story on how his card skimming operation worked, what led to his arrest, and how he's since built tools that help detect the exact fraud he used to commit.
• A retired FBI cyber crime agent's take on why nearly 90% of the financial fraud he investigated could have been prevented, and the cybersecurity training mindset he now teaches.
• How a Postal Inspector's small agency structure makes relationship-building and fraud conference collaboration a survival skill, not a nice-to-have.
• An NYPD detective's approach to dismantling large scale fraud schemes and money laundering investigation targets, plus a real elder fraud wellness check made possible entirely through IAFCI chapter connections.
• What South Carolina prison investigators are finding through prison financial crime investigations on contraband cell phones, including AI enabled fraud like deepfake documents and videos, plus peer-to-peer payment fraud tied to inmate financial fraud.
• Why IAFCI's law enforcement and bank collaboration model, letting each side sit in on the other's sessions, is something conference attendees keep pointing to as a genuine differentiator.
• The recurring themes across nearly every conversation of transnational fraud schemes operating at scale, and why the fraud fighter community, not any single tool or team, is still fraud fighters' biggest advantage.

• Are a fraud, risk, or financial crimes professional who wants a real, one-the ground feel for what IAFCI conversations actually sound like.
• Are someone curious what a fraudster turned fraud fighter can teach the industry that a traditional investigator can’t.
• Are on a fraud team or a law enforcement investigator and looking for practical examples of bank enforcement and bank collaboration paying off.
• Are working adjacent to card skimming, prison financial crime investigations, or elder fraud and want real case examples.
• Are a fraud fighter, have felt isolated in your role, and want a reminder that the fraud fighting community changes what’s possible.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This one is recorded live at SardineCon as a fireside chat. You’re getting the real, unscripted version of a conversation I had with Andrew Austin from Sardine and Arjun Ramakrishnan from GoDaddy. This one involves no rehearsed talking points. Just a conversation in front of a room full of people who live this work every day. Arjun brought the merchant and payments side. Andrew brought the fraud technology side. We sat down to talk about AI driven fraud, and how cheap and fast this has all become.

AI is not introducing a new species of fraud. It’s the same things we have always fought. Everything from bust-out schemes, card testing, synthetic identities, to fake businesses. What’s changed is the speed, the scale, and the cost. That’s what we spend the next forty-five minutes unpacking.

• How AI-generated fraudulent websites and website cloning fraud have erased one of the oldest fraud indicators fraud teams relied on. We can no longer just rely on whether a business’s website looks legitimate.
• How bust-out fraud has scaled from two or three manually cultivated accounts to AI agents fraud rings running 30 or 40 synthetic accounts simultaneously.
• Why card testing attacks no longer follow predictable dollar amounts or velocity patterns, and what that means for payment fraud velocity patterns detection.
• The real tension fraud teams face balancing KYB friction vs fraud, and why adding more friction can push legitimate customers to a competitor.
• Why consortium data fraud detection and network-level fraud analysis matter more than ever when a single fraud ring can span dozens of seemingly unrelated accounts.
• How cost asymmetry in fraud is reshaping the entire fight, where attackers iterate for cents while defenders spend real dollars to respond.
• Why traditional fraud loss forecasting models are becoming unreliable in a world of constantly evolving agentic fraud attacks.
• What fraud team innovation strategy actually needs to look like going forward, including real-time fraud detection, fraud rule engine automation, and a genuine embrace of AI fraud cost barrier realities.

• Work in merchant onboarding fraud risk, payments, or trust and safety and want a grounded, practitioner-level view of AI driven fraud.
• Are responsible for detecting synthetic identity fraud, card not present fraud, or bust-out fraud at a bank, fintech, or payments platform.
• Have ever had to defend a KYB friction vs fraud tradeoff to your sales or product team and want language to make that case better.
• Are evaluating consortium data fraud detection or network-level fraud analysis tools and want real-world context for why they matter now.
• Lead a fraud team trying to figure out where to actually invest given the AI fraud cost barrier attackers no longer face.
• Want a live conversation with real talk from people actively fighting this every day.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This one’s a little different. I recorded this episode live on the floor at SardineCon 2026, and instead of one long sit down with a single guest, you're getting a debrief of the day. One conversation after another, right where they happened.

I kicked things off by catching up with Simon Taylor after his opening keynote. From there I sat down with Tal Yeshanov, Head of Risk and Compliance at Zeni, who’s spent 17 years in payment risk and consulting. Everything from chargeback abuse to friendly fraud to credit risk. Then came the conversation that’s going to stick with you. Joseph Cox didn’t just talk about AI powered fraud in theory. And to close out the day, Karisse Hendrick and I got into a full recap of Sardine Con.

If you couldn’t make it this year, consider this your SardineCon 2026 debrief. Straight from the people who were actually there.

• Simon Taylor on whether the industry actually understands AI or is just moving fast enough to look like it does
• Tal Yeshanov on 17 years in payment risk, and the practical takeaways she's already applying from SardineCon sessions on AI and AB testing
• Joseph Cox walking through how he built and deployed a fake ID against a real KYC process, and what it revealed about where fraud detection still falls short
• Why agentic commerce came up in almost every conversation on the show floor, and what it means for how fraud teams need to start thinking
• Karisse Hendrick on her SardineCon roundtable, where the room debated who owns liability when an agent makes the purchase
• A rundown of the sessions, fireside chats, and roundtables that shaped the day, plus a look at Sardine's own workflow product

• Couldn’t make it to SardineCon 2026 and want the debrief straight from the floor
• Are trying to figure out where agentic commerce fits into your fraud strategy
• Want to hear what it actually looks like when someone tests fake ID detection and KYC testing against real defenses instead of just talking about it
• Are building out deepfake detection and want perspective from people who are living it day to day
• Want to hear how a traditional bank is thinking about fraud alongside the fintech and crypto crowd
• Like your fraud content with a little conference energy instead of another studio recording