Turning The Tide: How Mastercard is Pushing Back on Fraudsters and Reducing Transaction Confusion

WIRED

06-05-2025

Criminal networks are deploying increasingly sophisticated methods, costing consumers billions. With AI helping to protect its 159 billion transactions a year, Mastercard is turning the tide and safeguarding trust
Whether it's fake delivery texts, fraudulent online storefronts, or criminals using AI-cloned voices to fool your bank's phone security systems, fraudsters are getting more sophisticated—and bolder. More than half of recently polled consumers reported spotting a fraud attempt at least once a week. It's no wonder UK consumers lost an estimated £1.17 billion to fraud in 2023.
Few understand the scale of the challenge—or the path towards solutions—as well as Mastercard. Since the earliest days of credit card fraud, the global technology company, which today processes 159 billion payments a year, has been going toe-to-toe with criminal gangs, examining trends and identifying innovative new ways to outsmart fraudsters. Now, with criminal networks increasingly turning to AI and other weapons to deceive their victims, Mastercard is deploying its own technology to fight back.
'Much of our innovation and our readiness to confront fraud is borne out of our investment in technology and data,' explains Johan Gerber, Executive Vice President and Head of Mastercard's Security Solutions business. 'This is what drives our understanding of the patterns and trends that help us become more resilient.'
Protecting the spectrum of payments
It starts from the moment you open an account. Mastercard's AI tools can spot fraudsters attempting to use synthetic or fake identities. It can determine whether a customer is genuine by the way they hold their phone or swipe up or down.
When you attempt a new transaction, the company's Decision Intelligence technology—trained on hundreds of billions of transactions and trillions of data points, including account, purchase, merchant, and device information—analyzes in just 50 milliseconds whether the behavior is suspicious and therefore likely to be fraudulent. Mastercard says its recent enhancements to the technology is working, detecting more than 40% more fraud versus Q1 last year.
And when you do make a purchase, Mastercard's tech provides detailed and transparent breakdowns of each purchase in your banking app, so that you can quickly review transactions to check for potential fraud.
Smarter, More Secure, and More Personal
As ecommerce transactions skyrocket, some cardholders are challenging genuine transactions. This trend, known as First Party Fraud, is already estimated to cost merchants around $50bn (£39bn) per year.
To help combat this growing fraud type, Mastercard's First-Party Trust program, already live in the US, leverages advanced identity technology and AI to enable businesses to fight instances where genuine transactions are mistakenly or intentionally challenged by cardholders. As a result, Mastercard has observed a 15-20 percent chargeback deflection rate in initial studies.
'As ecommerce booms, we need to focus not only on reducing fraud, but on structuring the right incentives to encourage proactive investment in security. This needs to be sustainable for all parties,' says Gerber. 'It is part of our vision for keeping payments smarter and more personal, as well as more secure."
In some cases, cyber criminals have been able to penetrate banks' own security systems, disabling fraud detection methods and withdrawal limits. In 2018, for example, cyber criminals allegedly used the method to steal £11.5m from ATMs in 28 countries in just 2 hours. As criminals leverage AI more and more, Mastercard has constantly evolved its tech to prevent such widespread attacks by monitoring transactions at the network level, flagging suspicious behavior with banks as they happen. The company claims that doing so has prevented almost $50 billion in thefts in the last two years alone.
But a lot of the time, scams are personal: a phone call, text message, or a DM seemingly from a relative, or loved-one. Romance and 'fake relative' scams are just two examples of frauds designed to trick you into sending money willingly. In 2023, so-called Authorised Push Payment (APP) frauds conned UK consumers out of £459 million.
To combat this, Mastercard's world-first Consumer Fraud Risk technology analyzes risk factors around a transaction and alerts both the sending and receiving banks. Since 2023, the solution has helped 14 UK banks identify and stop scam payments before they left the victim's account.
In a bid to combat other types of fraud, Mastercard has also expanded its generative AI capabilities to be able to determine the full 16-digits of compromised numbers hidden by fraudsters in illegal websites, allowing banks to block them quickly before fraud takes place.
There's some evidence that the industry's anti-fraud efforts are working: the UK government's own Payment Systems Regulator reported that the value of APP scams has fallen by over 12 percent since 2023.
'With every step forward in technology, we're not just defending against threats—we're shaping a digital future where innovation and security walk hand in hand,' says Gerber. 'This way we are ensuring trust remains the cornerstone of every interaction.'
Discover more at mastercard.com