Visa has said that its new fraud department, Visa Scam Disruption (VSD), saved victims $350 million across dozens of scams last year.

The department’s scam disruption practice, which sits under Visa Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control (PERC), focuses on identifying and stopping complex scams as they emerge.

The money saved by the practice builds on the $40 billion PERC blocked in attempted fraud on the Visa network last year.

The new department brings together a cross-disciplinary team that deploys mitigation strategies across various scams. As well as hiring engineers and AI developers, the company has focused on recruiting non-traditional career paths like former law enforcement, military professionals and data visualisation experts.

VSD also uses "cutting-edge" technology and extensive proprietary network-level data to analyse and thwart scams.

The company said that investigators use genAI tools which enable correlation and graphing analysis to identify complex relationships and parse through mass amounts of data to identify true positive and impactful scam activity.

Visa then partners with financial institutions, law enforcement agencies, and third-party partners to disrupt the scam network infrastructure.

In 2024, in one of the biggest scam networks identified thus far, Visa found patterns of fraud in merchants tied to “identity verification.”

Using a phishing link sent via a dating website made to look like a legitimate identity verification site, scammers then enrolled the victims in recurring billing cycles.

Visa said that by correlating transactions with IP data and applying advanced logic to the combined set, it was able to map out a network of merchants with similar scam attributes to identify the full infrastructure of the scheme.

Visa then shut down nearly 12,000 of these fraudulent merchants, preventing losses of over $37 million in fraud.

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

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