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As financial institutions help their customers counter fraud, Feedzai is releasing a tool to help FIs better identify potential scams.
Dubbed ScamAlert, the service, which incorporates an artificial-intelligence utility, can help identify tactics criminals use to exploit consumers. Many consumers may initially fall for a scam through a phishing email; phishing attacks numbered 342,092 in September, a 13.5% increase from August, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group. Feedzai intends for ScamAlert to thwart that activity and others.
Banks can integrate ScamAlert into operations such as self-service at the time of a payment, where the customer can verify the authenticity of an advertisement, invoice, or email before completing a transaction. Or they can integrate ScamAlert into the FI’s risk operation. That can provide detailed assessments of potential risks.
Consumers can interact with the service by uploading screenshots of potential scams, whether they are from text messages and emails to marketplace listings, ads, or Web site addresses, via a mobile banking app or desktop. Portugal-based Feedzai, which has U.S. headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., says ScamAlert uses different modes to analyze text, images, and transaction data in real time.
“With ScamAlert, we’re deploying a two-pronged approach: our AI agent provides real-time feedback to customers that helps them identify scams, and it also serves as a powerful tool for customer education,” Nuno Sebastio, Feedzai cofounder chief executive, says in a statement. “The interactive nature of ScamAlert reinforces the scam-prevention message, ensuring that every customer becomes an active line of defense. We all know that prevention measures are only as strong as our weakest link, and in the world of scams, that link is often the customer.”
Threats to consumers will be compounded as generative AI also is employed by criminals to trick them. Visa Inc., last year pointed out that generative AI was among the biggest fraud threats.
