Welcome back to Fraudology.

This week I’m joined by Dave G., who spent years investigating money laundering, wire fraud, and scams before moving into e-commerce and, eventually, directly into crypto. Dave was on the ground floor of Bitcoin back when the white paper first came out, and he brings a rare vantage point on stablecoin fraud risk as someone who has watched a payment technology evolve from a niche curiosity into the backbone of a real conversation about agentic commerce.

We start with a story that sets the tone for the whole conversation. It demonstrates how unpredictable this space has always been, and how easily it is to miss where the real value and the real risk end up landing. From there, we get into the heart of what a stablecoin actually is, and why stablecoin unit economics change the payment fraud conversation entirely. They function less like a new currency and more like an infrastructure upgrade.

That capability sounds abstract until you follow it to its logical endpoint; agentic e-commerce. Everyone wants to talk about AI agents buying jackets, concert tickets, or collectibles, the high-consideration, emotionally driven purchases people actually enjoy shopping for. But Dave argues the real volume, and the real fraud exposure, is going to show up in the boring stuff. Bread, milk, and eggs. The things nobody wants to spend time discovering, just delivered. And when those transactions are worth pennies instead of dollars, low-dollar transaction fraud stops looking like a nuisance and starts looking like a scalable business model for criminals willing to take a cent at a time instead of hundreds of dollars at once.

That shift exposes a chargeback liability gap that already has real victims. A reminder that new payment technology fraud adoption always follows the same pattern: whatever gets built, someone tries to exploit before the guardrails exist.

• How Dave went from investigating money laundering and wire fraud to working directly in crypto, and the story of accidentally giving away roughly $1.5 million in Bitcoin at industry conferences.
• Why stablecoin fraud risk needs to be understood separately from Bitcoin fraud history, and how stablecoins function more like an infrastructure upgrade than a new currency.
• How stablecoin unit economics make micropayment fraud economics viable at a scale traditional card and ACH rails were never built to support.
• Why the agentic e-commerce conversation has it backwards, focusing on high-consideration purchases like jackets and concert tickets instead of the low-dollar transaction fraud risk hiding in everyday purchases like bread, milk, and eggs.
• A real chargeback liability example where a cardholder admitted an AI agent made the purchase, and the merchant still had no compelling evidence chargeback rules to fight it.
• Why device-based identity verification is a weaker foundation than the industry treats it as, and an early look at an emerging protocol for verifying AI agent identities.
• How consortium fraud data sharing can create real, sometimes irreversible fraud blacklist consortium risk when a label gets attached to the wrong entity.
• A subscription chargebacks story involving an antivirus company that charged customers for software that did nothing at all.
• Why every new payment technology, from ACH to stablecoins, follows the same pattern: fraud arrives before the guardrails do.

• Work in payments, fraud risk, or chargeback management and want to understand where stablecoin fraud risk and agentic commerce actually intersect.
• Are responsible for card network relationships or dispute strategy and want to understand the chargeback liability gap in agent-initiated purchases.
• Are evaluating identity verification strategies and want a real critique of device-based identity as a long-term solution.
• Participate in a fraud consortium and want to better understand the risk and responsibility that comes with labeling data.
• Are trying to get ahead of new payment technology fraud adoption instead of reacting to it after losses show up.
• Want a grounded, practitioner-level conversation about crypto fraud and payment fraud that goes beyond the hype cycle.

In this episode, I'm sitting down with Tal Yeshanov. Someone I've known for a very long time in this industry, and one of the sharpest risk leaders I know. Tal's path into fraud started almost by accident at Google and YouTube. Then took her through building fraud programs at Eventbrite, before its IPO, and Uber during its earliest hockey-stick growth years. Tal has spent her career building holistic fraud detection systems from scratch, in industries where there was no playbook to follow.

For years, fraud teams operated off a snapshot. Device at checkout. IP at checkout. Did the payment information match? Tal walks through why that single-moment view is no longer enough. And why the shift toward an orchestration platform, one that pulls in customer journey risk signals from the moment a user lands on your site rather than just the moment they transact, is where modern fraud programs are actually headed.

The deeper theme of this episode is what happens when you stop treating fraud detection as a scoring exercise, and start treating it as a full picture. Tal shares a personal story about a rule she built early in her career that was, on paper, flawless. It caught the exact triangulation fraud pattern it was designed for. It also caught a company executive, because his girlfriend used his credit card in a different city. That's false positive reduction in fraud detection in its most human form, and it's a direct argument for upstream fraud prevention data collection: pulling in more signals earlier in the journey instead of adding more rules at the transaction point.

• How Tal moved from Google and YouTube into building fraud programs at Eventbrite and Uber with no existing playbook to follow.
• Why holistic fraud detection means tracking customer journey risk signals from first visit to transaction, not just a snapshot at checkout.
• How an orchestration platform unifies device, IP, email, and behavioral data that used to live in separate point solutions.
• A real story about false positive reduction in fraud detection, including a rule that was technically perfect and still failed a legitimate customer.
• How the same holistic approach extends to account takeover detection, including typing cadence, autofill behavior, and device history.
• Why domain expertise vs AI in fraud isn't a competition, and how agentic AI is being used right now to query databases, support customer service teams, and triage escalations.
• A candid conversation about AI replacing fraud jobs, including a real example of a company that prematurely laid off its fraud leadership.
• Why fraud team tribal knowledge doesn't transfer to an AI model, and what companies risk losing when it walks out the door.
• Tal's fraud leadership philosophy, built on transparency and empathy, and why it creates teams that stay in touch for years.
• The ongoing industry shift from risk team vs fraud team naming, and why more companies are choosing the broader term.

• Work in fraud detection, risk operations, account security, or trust and safety.
• Are evaluating an orchestration platform or trying to move your fraud program beyond point-in-time scoring.
• Want a practical, non-hypothetical look at where agentic AI actually fits in fraud operations today.
• Are a fraud leader worried about AI replacing fraud jobs on your team, or trying to make the case for why domain expertise still matters.
• Care about fraud leadership philosophy and want to build a team that stays loyal and stays sharp.

Welcome back to Fraudology.

Every once in a while I come across a report that makes me stop what I was planning to talk about because it's just that important. This is one of those weeks.

Matt Vega recently released his quarterly fraud report 2026, and after reading it, I knew we needed to break it down together. Not because it's predicting what might happen next year. Because every attack covered in this report is already happening.

One of the biggest themes running through the report is that fraud is simply moving faster than fraud teams are. AI is making sophisticated attacks cheaper, easier to launch, and much harder to detect. Criminals no longer need deep technical skills when they can rent the tools they need through fraud as a service marketplaces.

So what does that actually look like?

In this episode, I walk through several of the newest fraud tactics already showing up in the wild, including malware hidden behind fake unsubscribe links, banking malware that can piggyback on a customer's trusted device, and session hijacking techniques that make account takeover fraud incredibly difficult to detect using traditional fraud detection models.

At first glance, many of these attacks look legitimate. That's exactly the problem.

We also talk about why fraud teams can't rely on individual trust signals like device intelligence, IP reputation, or even behavioral analytics by themselves anymore. Criminals have learned how to blend into legitimate customer behavior, which means our approach to fraud detection and fraud prevention has to evolve too.

This is where things get interesting.

One of my biggest takeaways from Matt's report is that the answer isn't one new tool or one new model. It's layering better fraud intelligence, sharing information across consortium networks, and understanding the broader cybercrime trends happening outside your own organization. Because by the time a new attack reaches your queue, there's a good chance another company has already seen it.

I also spend a few minutes sharing an update on the Merchant Fraud Alliance conference, including our new AI bootcamp that's focused on practical ways fraud teams can start using AI in fraud prevention today. Not because AI replaces fraud analysts, but because it helps good teams move faster.

If you work in merchant fraud, banking fraud, online fraud, or e-commerce fraud, this is one of those episodes that will help you recognize the patterns before they become your next incident.

• Why Matt Vega's quarterly fraud report 2026 is one of the most valuable fraud intelligence resources released this year.
• How AI is accelerating modern cybercrime and making sophisticated attacks accessible through fraud-as-a-service platforms.
• A breakdown of several emerging fraud tactics already targeting merchants and financial institutions.
• How unsubscribe phishing campaigns are being used to install malware and keyloggers.
• Why banking malware is becoming increasingly effective at bypassing traditional fraud controls.
• How session hijacking enables criminals to perform account takeover fraud from trusted customer devices.
• Why device intelligence, IP reputation, and behavioral analytics all need to be evaluated together instead of independently.
• How fraud intelligence sharing and consortium data help organizations identify emerging threats faster.
• An update on the Merchant Fraud Alliance conference and its new AI in fraud prevention bootcamp.

• Lead fraud, risk, or trust & safety teams.
• Manage fraud prevention for an ecommerce merchant, fintech, bank, or payments company.
• Want to stay ahead of the latest cybercrime trends instead of reacting after attacks become widespread.
• Are evaluating how AI is changing both fraud prevention and AI fraud.
• Build or manage fraud detection models.
• Investigate account takeover, synthetic identity, or online fraud.
• Want practical fraud prevention best practices instead of theoretical discussions.
• Rely on device intelligence, IP reputation, or behavioral analytics as part of your fraud strategy.

Welcome back to Fraudology.

In this episode, I’m sitting down with Mark Porteous, a longtime leader in e-commerce fraud and trust who knows two-sided marketplaces from the inside out. Mark spent nine years at StockX, where he started in customer support before building the company’s fraud program from the ground up. And honestly, that is one of the best ways to learn marketplace fraud prevention because you see the customer complaints, the chargebacks, the seller issues, the account problems, and the policy gaps before anybody has officially decided they belong to a fraud team.

We get into what makes online marketplace fraud so different from traditional e-commerce. In a standard retail transaction, the merchant controls the inventory, the pricing, and fulfillment. In a two-sided marketplace, the platform may be trusting one person to sell, another person to buy, and sometimes a third person to deliver the product. Every additional participant creates another identity question, another fraud vector, and another opportunity for marketplace scams or policy abuse.

The deeper theme of this episode is market volatility fraud. Prices can change dramatically because of a sports result, a viral release, an artist announcement, a celebrity event, or a sudden shortage. When that happens, legitimate customer behavior changes, but fraudulent behavior changes too. Sellers may decide not to fulfill because they can resell the item for more. Buyers may file friendly fraud chargebacks after prices fall. Stolen cards may be used to purchase high-demand inventory. And risk models that normally work well can suddenly start treating good customers like fraudsters.

Marketplace fraud prevention cannot stay on autopilot. Fraud leaders need strong policies, clear escalation playbooks, reliable fraud intelligence, and real collaboration with vendors, data teams, customer support, marketing, product, and leadership.

• How Mark moved from customer support into building a marketplace fraud program from the ground up.
• Why two-sided and multi-sided marketplaces create more complex identity, payment, seller, and fulfillment risks.
• How marketplace pricing volatility can trigger seller non-fulfillment, policy abuse, first-party fraud, and chargebacks.
• Why World Cup ticket pricing is a real-time example of market volatility fraud.
• How friendly fraud can increase when buyers repurchase the same item after its secondary-market price drops.
• Why fraud models and vendor strategies cannot be left on autopilot during high-demand events.
• How approval rates, false declines, fraud risk scoring, and card-not-present fraud need to be balanced during sudden demand spikes.
• Why fraud leaders need playbooks, policy enforcement, and clear escalation paths before an unexpected event happens.
• How to work with marketing, product, growth, finance, customer support, and security without becoming the team that says no to everything.
• Why strong fraud storytelling must always be supported by fraud analytics and measurable business impact.

• Work in marketplace fraud prevention, trust and safety, fraud operations, or fraud risk management.
• Manage buyer fraud, seller fraud, marketplace chargebacks, seller verification, or payment fraud prevention.
• Work for a ticketing, sneaker, collectible, resale, delivery, or multi-sided marketplace.
• Need a better approach to fraud monitoring during major events, product releases, shortages, or pricing spikes.
• Want to improve collaboration between fraud, customer support, product, growth, marketing, finance, and security teams.

In this episode of Fraudology, Karisse Hendrick provides a comprehensive debrief following the massive shifts in the world of artificial intelligence and digital fraud. Karisse shares her highlights and lowlights from navigating the industry's rapid evolution, cutting through the future-looking hype to provide practical insights for fraud and payments professionals.

The conversation explores the evolving mechanics of Agentic AI in commerce, detailing how partnerships like the new Visa and OpenAI infrastructure are designed to make AI commerce a reality. Karisse provides an inside look at why OpenAI previously shelved its original agentic project to avoid becoming a merchant of record, shifting away from full structural ownership due to complex liability rules and low initial adoption.

We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the fraud landscape today:

• The VAMP Threshold "Cliff": How Visa’s monitoring programs offer no "trial" or "safety" months anymore, immediately penalizing merchants the first month they cross thresholds with instant fines and fees per chargeback and TC40.
• The Complexity of Agentic Chargebacks: Real-world examples of "authorized" AI purchases where merchants are automatically losing disputes because card brands do not yet have established "compelling evidence" rules or representment provisions for AI agents.
• The Hook of Cloned Sites: Why AI models looking purely for the "best deal" are inadvertently leading consumers straight into elaborate, cloned phishing websites that harvest credit card data and trigger fraudulent descriptors.

Additionally, Karisse dives into the latest real-world data from a recent UK case study highlighting how fraudulent duplicate sites for household brands appeared directly inside ChatGPT's search indexes. We break down the immediate operational steps fraud leaders must take to protect their customer service channels and coordinate with IT to combat malicious DNS activity before these automated losses skyrocket.

In this episode of Fraudology, Karisse Hendrick sits down with Hailey Windham, Community Lead for Banking at Sardine and host of the Fraud Forward podcast. Hailey shares her journey transitioning from a practitioner at community financial institutions to the vendor side, focusing entirely on providing practical, operational insights for credit unions and community bank fraud teams.

The conversation explores the highly anticipated June 2026 updated guidance from FinCEN regarding Section 314B of the USA Patriot Act. Hailey breaks down how this new fact sheet eliminates long-standing confusion and regulatory fears, giving financial institutions a robust legal framework to safely share information and collaborate under a liability safe harbor.

We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the banking fraud landscape today:

• Fraud Explicitly in Scope: How the new guidance expands past narrow money laundering limits to formally include computer fraud and scams targeting individuals, organizations, or governments.
• Reasonable Suspicion vs. Certainty: Why teams no longer need a fully completed investigation or total certainty before sharing data, making early sharing on incomplete information permissible.
• Real-Time Data Transmission: The protocol shifts allowing financial institutions to share verbal alerts, video surveillance footage, IP addresses, and attempted transactions in real time.
• The Power of Associations: How non-bank compliance providers and industry trade groups can now legally organize 314B associations so smaller institutions don't have to fight fraud alone.

Additionally, Hailey dives into the preliminary insights from the industry’s first practitioner-built benchmarking survey for community banks and credit unions under $10 billion. We examine the systemic issues keeping banking fraud fighters up at night, from rigid legacy core system limitations to the immense pressures of tackling an exponential surge in social engineering scams with limited resources.

Connect with Hailey Windham

In this episode of Fraudology, host Karisse Hendrick cuts through the AI noise to analyze the critical fraud news and regulatory developments impacting the industry today. Inspired by conversations with Merchant Fraud Alliance ambassadors, Karisse separates empty hype from actionable intelligence to help fraud and payments professionals better protect their organizations.

The episode kicks off with a personal story: a real-time "fraud phone a friend" scenario involving a reissued credit card that suffered an enumeration attack (card testing) before it was even activated. Karisse breaks down the mechanics of modern BIN enumeration attacks. How fraudsters leverage AI to narrow down math equations like the Luhn algorithm, test numbers across friction-free merchant checkouts, and navigate the lack of activation requirements or AVS letter checks in payments. She also touches on Visa's merchant enumeration thresholds and the lesser-known Visa Issuer Monitoring Program (VIMP).

Karisse then reviews four major industry news stories driving the future of cyber fraud:

• The Fall of Frontier Models & The KYC Paradox: Following the U.S. government forcing AI models Mythos 5 and Fable 5 offline over cybersecurity concerns, frontier AI labs are pushing for strict, bank-grade Know Your Customer (KYC) identity verification. Karisse reads an insightful debrief explaining why traditional KYC will fail to stop threat actors due to pre-verified accounts, session-hijacking infostealer logs, and deepfake biometrics.
• Meta's $16 Billion Scam Economy: New statistics and internal documents reveal that Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) account for up to 68% of fraud reported by major institutions like Lloyds Bank—and that Meta actively profits off fraudulent ad traffic rather than taking it down.
• The Reality of the UK's Mandatory APP Fraud Reimbursement: A 15-month progress check on the UK's 50/50 mandatory scam reimbursement policy for banks. While 89% of in-scope losses were returned to victims, APP fraud losses actually climbed year-over-year due to high-value, long-gestation social engineering scams.
• Google's RICO Lawsuit Against "Outsider": Google files a lawsuit targeting "Outsider," a massive PhaaS (Phishing-as-a-Service) Telegram network responsible for 9,000 fake sites, $1.9 billion stolen, and over 3.87 million compromised credit cards using AI-assisted smishing templates.

In this episode of Fraudology, Karisse Hendrick provides a comprehensive debrief following her long-awaited conversation with Kathy Stokes, the Senior Director of Fraud Prevention for AARP. Kathy shares her highlights and lowlights from leading the Fraud Watch Network, cutting through the general consumer education hype to provide practical insights for fraud and payments professionals.

The conversation explores the evolving mechanics of fraud victimization in commerce, detailing how organizations like AARP are now identifying systemic vulnerabilities by monitoring "invisible" behaviors, such as how society naturally blames the victims of these crimes. Kathy provides an inside look at why the industry must move away from simply playing "whack-a-mole" at the point of transaction, moving toward shared intelligence to avoid the massive financial and emotional liabilities of sophisticated networks.

We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the fraud landscape today:

• The Private-Public Intelligence Threshold: How the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center (NEFCC/NEFSI) is bringing enterprise giants like Amazon, Google, and Walmart together with law enforcement to drastically turn isolated smaller incidents into massive, prosecutable organized crime cases.
• The Complexity of Systemic Collaboration: Real-world examples of how major financial institutions are shifting their legal stances from hiding data due to perceived risk, to realizing that there is a far greater risk if they do not share fraud data across networks.
• The Human Element vs. The Script: Why senior fraud leadership and empathetic human support systems cannot be replaced by generic checklists, as the critical domain expertise and emotional recovery required to turn victims into survivors is found only through dedicated peer communities.

Additionally, Kathy dives into the latest AARP initiatives, revealing the staggering reality of a $200 billion a year crime loss that impacts countless demographics across the United States. We break down the production behind AARP's Fraud Wars YouTube series, a historic project designed to humanize the impact of fraud and challenge the long-standing apathy within enterprise spaces. Finally, we examine how an organization's willingness to block scams depends almost entirely on shifting corporate mindsets away from accepting multi-million dollar losses as just an "acceptable level of risk."

**To sign up for the VAMP Webinar, June 16 at 1pm ET:

https://events.zoom.us/ev/AjeqbDavKTXXc6iR8Z6Sbr8ttRf-9pqHa4fj_vccOfo1dwgNt6sG~AnY80C-qT5FYf6tPvk9UKHiJqkeUb_76qCOKNJdretWRhD6K3Ps2OwBmPw

In this solo episode of Fraudology, Karisse Hendrick breaks down a potpourri of recent fraud news stories that are shaking up both the retail and banking sectors. Karisse exposes how organized crime rings are shifting their tactics to outsmart even the tightest security frameworks, highlighting why continuous adaptation is the only defense in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.

The conversation explores the mechanics of a highly devious new retail scam targeting major retailers through manipulated HTML price-matching. Karisse provides an inside look at how these groups leverage local code manipulation on personal devices to walk away with hundreds of dollars in real store credit per hit, effectively dodging security measures previously put in place to halt bulk gift card theft.

We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the fraud landscape today:

• The Power and Price of AI Cybersecurity: How major US banks are scrambling to patch thousands of IT vulnerabilities exposed by Anthropic's new preview model, Mythos, which can stitch together low-risk flaws into serious, exploitable threats.
• The Reality of AI Replacement Plans: Why CEOs are facing unexpected hurdles with corporate layoffs, balancing the spiraling token costs of running AI agents against the irreplaceable institutional knowledge of human teams.
• Biometric Exfiltration from Selfies: The startling reality of "scissor-hand" or peace sign poses in photos, where modern high-resolution cameras and AI tools allow fraudsters to reconstruct permanent fingerprint ridges.
• The Scale vs. Quality Shift in Phishing: How AI bots are allowing bad actors to simultaneously launch highly personalized bank impersonation attacks against small community banks and regional credit unions, overwhelming their baseline operational capacities.

Additionally, Karisse dives into the strategic logistics behind these multi-state fraud sprees, detailing how criminals use encrypted messaging apps and overseas reshippers to launder their proceeds. We break down the connection between retail fraud and elder tech support scams, revealing how stolen or victim-funded gift cards feed directly into high-end electronic purchases. Finally, we examine how deep-web dumps of dead credit card data are weaponized by scammers to accurately identify a consumer's specific financial institution before they ever make a call.

In this episode of Fraudology, host Karisse Hendrick welcomes back Marc Evans, a veteran Las Vegas detective and the founder of Fraud Hero. Marc provides an on-the-ground debrief of the rapidly shifting fraud landscape, sharing front-line insights into how criminal organizations are pivoting their tactics as traditional cash-out methods vanish.

The conversation explores the dramatic downfall of major crypto ATM networks, highlighted by the recent bankruptcy of Bitcoin Depot, the country's largest operator. Marc details how local regulations and strict transaction caps have inadvertently decimated the crypto ATM business model , proving just how much of their revenue was quietly subsidized by elder abuse and organized crime. We look at what happens when 9,000 machines go offline overnight and how scammers are reacting to losing one of their favorite liquidation tools.

We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the fraud landscape today:

• The AI Social Engineering Force Multiplier: How threat actors are combining generative AI with classic psychological manipulation to automate hyper-realistic phishing, clone voices, and scale scams to unprecedented levels.
• The Cognitive Bias of Automation: Why our increasing reliance on LLMs to summarize emails and messages is actively dulling human critical thinking, causing professionals and consumers alike to miss glaring red flags.
• The "Scam Formula" Framework: A breakdown of the universal four-part mechanics—the Hook, the Story, the Urgency, and the Payment —and how the simple mantra of "Pause, Think, Verify" can disrupt a fraudster's spell.

Additionally, Marc dives into the terrifying rise of digital extortion targeting a new demographic: teenagers under 17. We break down the latest FBI IC3 data showing how AI-driven sextortion schemes are uniquely impacting youth across the country , highlighting why fraud education must urgently expand beyond senior citizens to protect the next generation.