AI Enabled Fraud: When Growth Comes Before Guardrails

Welcome back to Fraudology.

AI is here, and it’s making every kind of fraud we already know cheaper, faster, and harder to catch. We are going to walk through a handful of stories that show exactly how AI enabled fraud is showing up right now. From card testing at scale to one very messy fraud story.

That story is Polymarket, and I spend some real time on it. It’s rare that we get this much visibility into a company’s actual fraud details. A Wall Street Journal investigation lays out the stolen debit cards linked to thousands of new accounts and a fraudulent deposit rate that hit 80%. I also get into AI-generated deepfake delivery orders, a bank coalition’s new warning about agentic commerce fraud, and a warning about AI voice cloning scams.

We aren’t eliminating fraud, we never can, but we can get the information to be as fast or slightly faster than the fraudsters.

What you’ll hear in this episode:Why AI-enabled BIN attack fraud and card testing are up over 75% according to at least one fraud vendor, and how fraudsters are now optimizing payment authorization the same way legitimate payment teams doA full breakdown of the Polymarket fraud scandal, including the prediction market fraud risk baked into its business model and the leadership decisions that made things worseWhy Polymarket scrapped its same-source withdrawal rule to speed up payouts, and how that decision opened the door to real money laundering prevention failuresA serious account takeover fraud exploit where a new account created with someone's stolen SSN could inherit their existing balance and linked cards, no password neededWhy compliance staffing fraud programs need people with actual prevention experience, not just investigators brought in after the factHow growth at all costs fraud risk plays out when a CEO's response to an 80% fraud rate is reportedly "just keep growing and pay a fine"A new bank coalition report on agentic commerce fraud, and why AI shopping agent chargeback liability still has no real framework under current Visa and Mastercard rulesAn AI-generated fake delivery order used to attempt a retail theft at Walmart, and a Georgia police chief's warningWhat a real chargeback monitoring program actually looks like from the inside, and why Polymarket landing a fraud vendor like Riskified says a lot about how serious this problem became

You should listen to this episode if you:Work in payments, card fraud, or retail fraud prevention and want a grounded look at how AI is scalin