Visa Unveils Its Scam Disruption Practice, Helping Protect Consumers and the Financial Ecosystem Globally

Visa, a global leader in payment technology, unveiled its scam disruption practice focused on identifying and stopping complex scams as they emerge. The new department, which sits under Visa Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control (PERC), saved victims $350 million across dozens of scams last year. This is in addition to the $40 billion PERC blocked in attempted fraud on the Visa network last year. “Visa has invested over $12 billion dollars in technology over the last five years, including to reduce fraud and enhance network security,” said 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.” Visa Scam Disruption (VSD) aims to protect consumers, clients and businesses by leveraging Visa’s deep expertise, technologies, and partnerships:

• Scam Intelligence: VSD brings together a cross-disciplinary team that deploys mitigation strategies across various scams. In addition to hiring best-in-class engineers and artificial intelligence developers, Visa has focused recruitment efforts on non-traditional career paths in the fight against scams, looking to former law enforcement, military professionals and data visualization experts.
• Proactive Scam Investigations: VSD mitigates scams through a proactive investigation process that leverages multiple channels and methodologies to identify and address scams before they inflict devastating losses on consumers
• Scam Detection and Disruption: VSD leverages cutting-edge technology and extensive proprietary network-level data to analyze and thwart scams. Investigators use Generative AI tools which enable correlation and graphing analysis to identify complex relationships and parse through mass amounts of data to identify true positive and impactful scam activity. Visa then partners with financial institutions, law enforcement agencies, and third-party partners to disrupt the scam network infrastructure. By collaborating with key stakeholders, VSD aims to dismantle scam operations and prevent future fraudulent activities.

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 of these fraudulent merchants. This effort prevented losses of over $37 million in fraud and has been referred to law enforcement. “Fraud usually has no face, but a scam is personal,” said 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.” For more information on how Visa works to protect the ecosystem against fraud of all sizes, visit Visa.com/security.