What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

I am bringing you more from here at IAFCI in Nashville. I've caught up with fraud fighters, bank executives, and law enforcement leaders for a rapid-fire soundcheck on where fraud is headed. I've been asking everyone I sit down with the same question. If you had one word to describe fraud in 2026, what would it be? The answers ranged from trending and explosive, to complex, and evolving. Sometimes fraud couldn't be contained by only one word. Honestly, they all fit.

There were so many great conversations this week. They didn't fit into one episode. They barely fit into two. So this episode is a rapid series of conversations covering everything from bust out fraud to elder fraud prevention, dealership schemes, and where IAFCI itself is headed under new leadership. Every one of these conversations left me with something I want to bring straight back to you. These conversations are not just about what we are facing. But also how we can overcome the rising challenges in our community, the tools, the collaboration, and the partnerships between law enforcement and banking that are only getting stronger.

Let's get into it.

• Why bust out fraud is being called a real hot topic right now. How these rings are migrating away from California and Florida as enforcement catches up.
• How auto lending fraud, first party fraud, and income misrepresentation are showing up together. Why leaning on consortium data and application data fraud signals is more important than relying on credit reports alone.
• How dealerships that barely exist are financing cars that were never actually delivered.
• Why business email compromise is still a top concern on the commercial banking side, and the stop call and confirm habit that stops it cold.
• Building a fraud prevention platform started with understanding the problem firsthand by moving into senior living communities.
• A fresh way to think about scam education as a behavior change problem, not just an awareness problem.
• Why check fraud trends remain a serious concern for community bank fraud programs, even as fraudsters increasingly bring AI targeted fraud attacks to smaller institutions.
• How law enforcement bank collaboration through IAFCI industry working groups is turning strangers into the people you call when a case needs to move fast.
• What's ahead for IAFCI itself, including new fraud policy and regulation partnerships and a membership goal of 10,000 by the end of the current term.

• Work in auto lending, dealership finance, or first party fraud detection and want real, current examples of bust out fraud.
• Are on the commercial banking side and want a reminder of how effective stop call and confirm still is against business email compromise.
• Care about elder fraud prevention and want to hear how one approach was built from direct, in-person research.
• Lead fraud or risk at a community bank and want perspective on check fraud trends and AI targeted fraud attacks hitting smaller institutions.
• Believe law enforcement bank collaboration is underrated and want real examples of what that actually looks like in practice.
• Want a fast-moving, one-word-answer kind of episode that still leaves you with real, usable takeaways.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This episode is another one that is unplugged, on the road, and recorded live at IAFCI International in Nashville. I am spending more time talking with the people who fight fraud from every angle. This time we talked about consumer fraud, identity theft, romance scams, account takeover on someone’s personal banking app, and the stuff that leads to the nightly news. But businesses get defrauded too, and when they do, it doesn’t just hit a balance sheet. It hits jobs, it hits communities, yet it barely hits the headlines.

These conversations will hit on a lot, and we will cover one topic that maybe doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. B2B fraud. From business identity verification, synthetic business entities, the regulatory gaps opening up around beneficial ownership, and where AI is genuinely helping instead of just adding to the noise.

Sit down, and let’s get into it with the fraud fighters sounding off on B2B fraud, synthetic entities, and everything AI is changing about the fight ahead.

• Why B2B fraud gets a fraction of the attention consumer fraud does, even though the downstream impact on employees and communities can be just as severe.
• How synthetic business entities and beneficial ownership fraud are becoming easier to pull off, and why recent FinCEN ownership rule changes are widening that gap.
• A real example of business email compromise reaching its highest recorded volume in FinCEN's history, and how compromised business inbox markets let criminals study a company's own email patterns before striking.
• What abandoned identity fraud actually means, criminals exploiting the identities of babies, deceased individuals, and people who simply don't monitor their own credit.
• Why traditional banking fraud vulnerabilities, like slow-moving cross-border wire fraud, are getting overlooked while everyone's attention shifts to AI and crypto.
• A practical framework for proactive fraud detection, including fraud detection beyond login and why the real fight starts before someone ever reaches your app.
• How layered fraud detection stacks and agentic AI fraud tools are being used to catch AI-scaled attacks, including one financial institution that saw 250,000 fraudulent account signups in a matter of days.
• Why IAFCI conference collaboration, a shared conversation, a follow-up call, a number saved after one good conversation, is still one of the most effective fraud-fighting tools out there.

• Work in business banking, commercial lending, or B2B fraud detection and want to hear this category taken seriously.
• Are responsible for business identity verification and want to understand how beneficial ownership fraud is shifting under new FinCEN rules.
• Have been affected by business email compromise or want to understand how compromised business inbox markets actually operate.
• Are building or evaluating layered fraud detection stacks and want real examples of agentic AI fraud tools in production.
• Believe fraud detection beyond login matters as much as anything happening inside your app.
• Want a genuine feel for why IAFCI conference collaboration keeps coming up as fraud fighters' biggest advantage.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This episode is recorded live and unplugged on the conference floor at IAFCI International in Nashville. I couldn’t fit everything I loved into one tidy gathering. Instead I’m bringing you the open floor conversations that, for me, are helping to unravel fraud and are weaving together fraud fighters.

The headliner here is Michael Perez, the first ever fraudster turned fraud fighter to appear on Fraud Forward. What happened in his story is what you’ll want to hear the most. Federal agents recognized he was more valuable teaching fraud prevention than sitting on the sidelines. Beyond Michael’s story is a walk around the conference floor with a retired FBI cyber crime agent turned author, a Postal Inspector on leveraging relationships, an NYPD detective on dismantling large scale fraud schemes tied to money laundering, and two South Carolina Department of Corrections investigators on the sophisticated financial crime investigations happening behind bars.

• Michael Perez's full story on how his card skimming operation worked, what led to his arrest, and how he's since built tools that help detect the exact fraud he used to commit.
• A retired FBI cyber crime agent's take on why nearly 90% of the financial fraud he investigated could have been prevented, and the cybersecurity training mindset he now teaches.
• How a Postal Inspector's small agency structure makes relationship-building and fraud conference collaboration a survival skill, not a nice-to-have.
• An NYPD detective's approach to dismantling large scale fraud schemes and money laundering investigation targets, plus a real elder fraud wellness check made possible entirely through IAFCI chapter connections.
• What South Carolina prison investigators are finding through prison financial crime investigations on contraband cell phones, including AI enabled fraud like deepfake documents and videos, plus peer-to-peer payment fraud tied to inmate financial fraud.
• Why IAFCI's law enforcement and bank collaboration model, letting each side sit in on the other's sessions, is something conference attendees keep pointing to as a genuine differentiator.
• The recurring themes across nearly every conversation of transnational fraud schemes operating at scale, and why the fraud fighter community, not any single tool or team, is still fraud fighters' biggest advantage.

• Are a fraud, risk, or financial crimes professional who wants a real, one-the ground feel for what IAFCI conversations actually sound like.
• Are someone curious what a fraudster turned fraud fighter can teach the industry that a traditional investigator can’t.
• Are on a fraud team or a law enforcement investigator and looking for practical examples of bank enforcement and bank collaboration paying off.
• Are working adjacent to card skimming, prison financial crime investigations, or elder fraud and want real case examples.
• Are a fraud fighter, have felt isolated in your role, and want a reminder that the fraud fighting community changes what’s possible.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This one is recorded live at SardineCon as a fireside chat. You’re getting the real, unscripted version of a conversation I had with Andrew Austin from Sardine and Arjun Ramakrishnan from GoDaddy. This one involves no rehearsed talking points. Just a conversation in front of a room full of people who live this work every day. Arjun brought the merchant and payments side. Andrew brought the fraud technology side. We sat down to talk about AI driven fraud, and how cheap and fast this has all become.

AI is not introducing a new species of fraud. It’s the same things we have always fought. Everything from bust-out schemes, card testing, synthetic identities, to fake businesses. What’s changed is the speed, the scale, and the cost. That’s what we spend the next forty-five minutes unpacking.

• How AI-generated fraudulent websites and website cloning fraud have erased one of the oldest fraud indicators fraud teams relied on. We can no longer just rely on whether a business’s website looks legitimate.
• How bust-out fraud has scaled from two or three manually cultivated accounts to AI agents fraud rings running 30 or 40 synthetic accounts simultaneously.
• Why card testing attacks no longer follow predictable dollar amounts or velocity patterns, and what that means for payment fraud velocity patterns detection.
• The real tension fraud teams face balancing KYB friction vs fraud, and why adding more friction can push legitimate customers to a competitor.
• Why consortium data fraud detection and network-level fraud analysis matter more than ever when a single fraud ring can span dozens of seemingly unrelated accounts.
• How cost asymmetry in fraud is reshaping the entire fight, where attackers iterate for cents while defenders spend real dollars to respond.
• Why traditional fraud loss forecasting models are becoming unreliable in a world of constantly evolving agentic fraud attacks.
• What fraud team innovation strategy actually needs to look like going forward, including real-time fraud detection, fraud rule engine automation, and a genuine embrace of AI fraud cost barrier realities.

• Work in merchant onboarding fraud risk, payments, or trust and safety and want a grounded, practitioner-level view of AI driven fraud.
• Are responsible for detecting synthetic identity fraud, card not present fraud, or bust-out fraud at a bank, fintech, or payments platform.
• Have ever had to defend a KYB friction vs fraud tradeoff to your sales or product team and want language to make that case better.
• Are evaluating consortium data fraud detection or network-level fraud analysis tools and want real-world context for why they matter now.
• Lead a fraud team trying to figure out where to actually invest given the AI fraud cost barrier attackers no longer face.
• Want a live conversation with real talk from people actively fighting this every day.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This one’s a little different. I recorded this episode live on the floor at SardineCon 2026, and instead of one long sit down with a single guest, you're getting a debrief of the day. One conversation after another, right where they happened.

I kicked things off by catching up with Simon Taylor after his opening keynote. From there I sat down with Tal Yeshanov, Head of Risk and Compliance at Zeni, who’s spent 17 years in payment risk and consulting. Everything from chargeback abuse to friendly fraud to credit risk. Then came the conversation that’s going to stick with you. Joseph Cox didn’t just talk about AI powered fraud in theory. And to close out the day, Karisse Hendrick and I got into a full recap of Sardine Con.

If you couldn’t make it this year, consider this your SardineCon 2026 debrief. Straight from the people who were actually there.

• Simon Taylor on whether the industry actually understands AI or is just moving fast enough to look like it does
• Tal Yeshanov on 17 years in payment risk, and the practical takeaways she's already applying from SardineCon sessions on AI and AB testing
• Joseph Cox walking through how he built and deployed a fake ID against a real KYC process, and what it revealed about where fraud detection still falls short
• Why agentic commerce came up in almost every conversation on the show floor, and what it means for how fraud teams need to start thinking
• Karisse Hendrick on her SardineCon roundtable, where the room debated who owns liability when an agent makes the purchase
• A rundown of the sessions, fireside chats, and roundtables that shaped the day, plus a look at Sardine's own workflow product

• Couldn’t make it to SardineCon 2026 and want the debrief straight from the floor
• Are trying to figure out where agentic commerce fits into your fraud strategy
• Want to hear what it actually looks like when someone tests fake ID detection and KYC testing against real defenses instead of just talking about it
• Are building out deepfake detection and want perspective from people who are living it day to day
• Want to hear how a traditional bank is thinking about fraud alongside the fintech and crypto crowd
• Like your fraud content with a little conference energy instead of another studio recording

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This one started with a can of hairspray. Jen Lamont and I were getting ready for a networking event, and somehow a conversation about hair products turned into a conversation about the future of fraud prevention in banking. Because we ended up talking about her mom. A career teller in banking for decades. Someone who knew multiple generations of families, who turned down promotions to stay at the window because she loved the people, who took pride in the role in ways that I think a lot of institutions have quietly trained out of the job.

And that got me asking a question I haven't been able to shake since: have we made it harder for the people closest to our customers to actually see them?

We still call tellers our first line of defense. But we've also loaded that line with sales goals, referral quotas, transaction time expectations, compliance responsibilities, and lobby metrics. Meanwhile, fraud has gotten more human than ever. Scammers aren't just stealing credentials anymore. They're manipulating customers into moving the money themselves. And the only person standing between a coached customer and a wire going out the door is often a teller who has been measured on everything except whether they noticed something felt wrong.

Jen brings a perspective to this conversation that I think is rare and really important. She's a fraud professional who grew up watching her mom build a full career at the teller window. She's seen what that role looks like when it's valued, and she's spent years as a practitioner trying to figure out how to rebuild some of that in institutions where the teller role has shifted into something almost unrecognizable.

This is not a conversation about blame. It's a conversation about what we've inherited, what we're still questioning, and what we could do differently.

• Why Jen's mom's career as a teller, and the pride she took in that role, is the lens for this entire conversation
• How teller performance metrics in banking have shifted from relationship quality to sales and efficiency, and what that costs us in fraud prevention
• A real wire fraud scenario that shows exactly what happens when a teller has a bad feeling but no clear authority or path to act on it
• Why the authorized versus unauthorized distinction misses the coercion behind authorized push payment scams
• What tellers can see that transaction monitoring systems miss, including behavioral fraud signals, coached customer body language, and vague answers to routine questions
• Why Jen sent a $35,000 wire she knew was fraud early in her career, and what changed after that
• What a direct escalation path to the fraud team actually needs to look like, and why ticketing systems are not enough
• Why prevented scam losses should count as strongly as product referrals on a teller scorecard
• What a senior teller career path and frontline fraud specialist role could actually look like
• The phrase you should keep in your pocket for any frontline employee dealing with a suspicious transaction

• Work in fraud or risk and want to understand what the career teller in banking brings to your fraud prevention program that your systems cannot replicate
• Lead a branch, manage frontline staff, or set teller performance metrics and want to know whether your scorecards are creating conflict between service speed and teller scam detection
• Are trying to build a better escalation path between your frontline and your fraud team
• Want practical, actionable recommendations you can bring back to your institution this week
• Have ever seen a scam succeed because the teller had the right instinct and no room to act on it
• Are building a fraud ambassador program or a senior teller fraud specialist role and want a framework for thinking through it
• Care about the human cost of fraud and want to hear a conversation about it from people who have sat with those losses

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

Community banks know they need digital transformation in banking to stay competitive. They also know one bad launch can overwhelm a fraud team, frustrate customers, and torch years of trust. So today we're going beyond the headline case study to unpack how one community bank actually pulled it off.

I'm joined by Omar Hamden, Chief Experience Officer at Vault.Bank, and Jorge Garcia, CEO of Linker Finance, to talk about how a 120-year-old community bank in Broadhead, Wisconsin turned itself into a digital brand, without opening the door to the fraud everyone assumes comes with it.

Omar didn’t want a system that approved everyone or treated every customer like a suspect. He wanted risk-based account opening that could actually tell the difference, and it worked. Fraud losses in digital banking at Vault have stayed close to zero since launch, with onboarding now taking about three minutes, funding included.

Most banks assume digital growth means a bigger fraud team. Vault runs its entire fraud and onboarding operation with two people. That's it. No army of analysts, just the right core banking integration and automation in place from day one.

Jorge breaks down why vendor selection for community bank leaders, not the technology, is usually the real blocker for community banks trying to launch digitally, and how Linker built a turnkey approach so Vault didn't have to stitch together a dozen point solutions on its own.

The numbers back all of it up. Vault grew deposits 16% year over year, five times its prior growth rate, and customer retention rate sits close to 90%. If your institution is weighing a digital brand launch in community banking, this digital banking case study is the one to send to your board.

• How Vault.Bank and Linker Finance came together to launch a digital-only brand for a community bank under $300 million in assets.
• Why risk-based account opening matters more than trying to hit zero fraud alerts.
• How identity verification and KYC digital onboarding got built to satisfy auditors without slowing down real customers.
• Why Vault runs its entire fraud and onboarding operation with a team of two people, and how core banking integration and automated decisioning make that possible.
• How vendor selection for community bank leaders became the real blocker in digital brand launches, more than the technology itself.
• The deposit growth strategies for banks that helped Vault grow deposits 16% year over year, five times its prior growth rate.
• Why customer retention rate matters just as much as acquisition, and how nearly 90% retention changed the growth conversation.
• What's next as Vault plans national digital banking expansion beyond Wisconsin.

• Community bank leaders considering a digital brand launch in community banking.
• Fraud and risk professionals evaluating fraud losses in digital banking and looking for real, verifiable numbers.
• Bank executives weighing vendor selection for community bank technology partnerships.
• Anyone curious how lean fraud team operations actually work without a large analyst team.
• Community banks exploring small business lending and neobank technology in community banks as growth levers.
• Boards and leadership teams trying to build the business case for bank compliance automation and best of breed banking technology.

What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward!

This episode opens a little differently. And if you are not paying close attention, you will probably believe it was me. It sounds like me, it looks like me, but every bit of it is a deepfake created with artificial intelligence in about twenty minutes for less than five dollars. That is not a future threat. That is today.

Andrew Austin is one of my favorite people to talk to because he does not do hype. He spends a lot of time exploring where emerging technology meets fraud risk. And this is one of the most practical conversations I have had on the show. We are not here to scare anyone. We are here to make sure fraud fighters understand exactly what they are up against and how organizations need to start thinking differently about deepfake fraud and AI voice cloning.

We walk through the full landscape of deepfake technology together, from voice cloning to live face swapping to lip sync. We talk about what each one costs, how convincing each one is, and where criminals are already using deepfake scams today. Andrew breaks down why identity verification is the most vulnerable point for financial institutions right now, why real time detection of AI-generated content is still an unsolved problem, and why fraudsters do not need Hollywood quality deepfakes to be effective. They just need to be convincing enough.

We do not stop at the threat. We spend the second half of the conversation talking about defenses, device intelligence, behavioral biometrics, consortium data, friction design, and why employee awareness and organizational culture still matter as much as any technology investment. Andrew also shares what excites him about where AI is headed on the fraud fighting side, and what he thinks every CISO should already have on their roadmap to combat AI fraud.

Fraud has always been built on manipulating trust. AI does not change that. It just gives criminals a far more convincing disguise.

• How Andrew created a convincing deepfake in twenty minutes for less than five dollars, and what that means for fraud teams
• The difference between voice cloning, live face swapping, and lip sync technology, and the distinct fraud risk each one creates
• Why deepfake scams do not need to be perfect to work, and how criminals are already exploiting that reality
• Where financial institutions are most vulnerable to AI-generated content right now, and why onboarding and IDV top the list
• Why real time detection of AI-generated video content is still not a solved problem
• How device intelligence, behavioral biometrics, and consortium data work together to close the gaps IDV alone cannot cover
• Why employee awareness and organizational culture are just as important as any technology investment
• What Andrew thinks every CISO should already have on their roadmap to combat AI fraud
• Where AI is creating real operational efficiency gains on the fraud fighting side, and why Andrew is genuinely excited about it

• Lead fraud, risk, compliance, or financial crimes at a bank, credit union, fintech, or neobank
• Are responsible for identity verification, onboarding design, or authentication strategy
• Want a practical, non-sensational breakdown of what deepfake scams and AI voice cloning actually look like today
• Are building or updating your fraud program and want to understand where AI fraud risk fits into your existing controls
• Are new to fraud and want to understand how emerging technology is reshaping what fraud fighters need to know