Stablecoin fraud risk, agentic commerce, and the chargeback liability gap nobody has solved

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.

What you'll hear in this episode: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,