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