Visa says that its newly-formed scam disruption practice prevented more than $350 million in attempted fraud in 2024.
The new department, which sits under Visa Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control (Perc), brings together a cross-disciplinary team, including engineers and artificial intelligence developers working alongside former law enforcement, military professionals and data visualization experts.
“Visa has invested over $12 billion dollars in technology over the last five years, including to reduce fraud and enhance network security,” says Paul Fabara, chief risk and client services officer at Visa. “At the same time, we have made a significant investment in our best weapon against scammers: our people. By combining our proprietary technology with the unique experiences and perspective our talent brings, we can more effectively identify and defeat even the savviest scammers.”
Investigators use Generative AI tools which enable correlation and graphing analysis to identify complex relationships and parse through mass amounts of data to identify and dismantle scam operations.
In one of the biggest scam networks identified thus far, Visa identified patterns of fraud in merchants tied to 'identity verification'. Using a phishing link sent via a dating website made to look like a legitimate identity verification site, scammers then enrolled the victims in recurring billing cycles. By correlating transactions with IP data and applying advanced logic to the combined set, Visa mapped a network of merchants with similar scam attributes to identify the full infrastructure of the scheme. Visa then shut down nearly 12,000 sites, preventing losses of over $37 million in fraud.
“Fraud usually has no face, but a scam is personal,” says Michael Jabbara, SVP and global head of Perc at Visa. “These scams directly impact the lives of victims, sometimes with devastating effects. Visa also collaborates with intelligence partners, law enforcement, and industry working groups to ensure that not only do we shut these scammers down, but the other members of the ecosystem are also equipped to spot red flags on their own.”