Visa Says New Anti-Fraud Unit Blocked $350 Million in Scam Attempts

Visa says its new anti-fraud disruption department saved potential victims $350 million last year.

The company’s scam disruption practice, announced Tuesday (March 11), part of Visa’s Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control (PERC), which itself blocked $40 billion in attempted fraud in 2024.

“Visa has invested over $12 billion dollars in technology over the last five years, including to reduce fraud and enhance network security,” Paul Fabara, chief risk and client services officer at Visa, said in a news release.

“At the same time, we have made a significant investment in our best weapon against scammers: our people. By combining our proprietary technology with the unique experiences and perspective our talent brings, we can more effectively identify and defeat even the savviest scammers.”

According to the release, Visa Scam Disruption (VSD) includes a “cross-disciplinary team” that deploys strategies to mitigate a range of scams. The unit also conducts “proactive” scam investigations to identify and address scams before they hurt consumers.

In addition, VSD employs generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools that can help “identify complex relationships and parse through mass amounts of data to identify true positive and impactful scam activity.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about an explosion in scams against banks and their customers, with criminals turning to new technologies and old-fashioned manipulation.

“Fraudsters pull at human nature in a bid to gain access to accounts and drain them — pleading through texts, phone calls and AI prompts for donations, romance, bail to get out of jail and more,” that report said.

“Scammers are industrious, becoming more businesslike, moving beyond blast emails toward a personalized approach as they pick their victims.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence — from the report “The Impact of Financial Scams on Consumers’ Finances and Banking Habits” — found that two types of scams cause more financial damage than average.

In first place are investment scams, which have a median loss of $1,104, followed by romance scams, with a median loss of $1,996.

“Romance scams also string targets along for an average of 3.6 transactions, which is nearly twice as many as other methods,” PYMNTS wrote.

This week also saw new findings from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), showing that consumers reported more than $12.5 billion in fraud losses last year. That’s a 25% uptick over 2023, driven not by a rise in the number of reports but an increase in people who reported losing money to a fraud or scam.