Visa Says Fraudsters Adapt as Payment Security Tightens

Scams have become the fastest-growing threat to payment security, Visa said in a new report.

Criminals have shifted their focus to deceiving humans rather than exploiting technical system compromises because core payment security continues to strengthen, the company said in a Wednesday (May 20) press release highlighting findings from its Spring 2026 Biannual Threats Report.

During the July to December 2025 period covered in the report, there was nearly $1 billion in scam-related activity identified by Visa, according to the release.

“Payments at a network level continue to get safer, but threats are evolving faster than ever,” Paul Fabara, chief risk and client services officer at Visa, said in the release. “Criminals are increasingly targeting people rather than technology, using deception, urgency and AI-enabled tools to exploit trust.”

The artificial intelligence-enabled tools used by criminals in their scams include AI-generated content, voice impersonation and deepfake media, according to the report. These tools have enabled fraudsters to increase the reach and the perceived credibility of their scams.

The shift toward scams requires institutions to adopt a scam defense that combines identity verification, intent assessment and manipulation detection, the report said.

Executives should consider building deception defense capabilities, treating customer communications as a security control, and aligning incentives and escalation paths across ecosystem partners to support faster takedown of scam networks, per the report.

Visa’s protections include continuous, AI-driven transaction monitoring across the network to detect and block emerging threats; a specialized scam disruption team to identify, investigate and dismantle scam networks; network-level disruption of large-scale attacks; and collaboration with banks, merchants, technology partners and law enforcement agencies to disrupt criminal networks, according to the report.

Michael Jabbara, senior vice president, payment ecosystem risk and control at Visa, said in the release that the rapid adoption of AI by fraudsters has made intelligence-driven defenses and coordinated action more important than ever.

“With this report, our goal is to help leaders act sooner—before fraud reaches consumers,” Jabbara said.

Scams are one of the hardest problems in fraud today because the victim authorizes the payment, believing it’s legitimate, Aman Cheema, vice president of global professional services and networks at Visa, said in the PYMNTS Intelligence eBook “How Visa Helps Businesses Stay Ahead of Payment Fraud.”

Prevention requires modeling how customers usually transact so that institutions can spot activity that falls outside the norm; deploying human expertise to find signals that deserve attention; and sharing intelligence across the ecosystem to respond more quickly and protect others from the same attack pattern, Cheema said in the eBook.