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When I come in fraud prevention In 2018, a typical fraud attack could take months to emerge. Now, it’s not uncommon to see successful fraud schemes He was executed within a few days. This momentum It not only challenges our current risk strategies, but also requires a completely new approach to fraud prevention.

A few years ago, a typical strategy involved fraudsters trying to reverse engineer a company’s risk defenses. They would start slowly, testing the system for vulnerabilities by examining different product features with a variety of stolen personal information or PII and payment data. Once they identified a blind spot, they would gradually increase the scale of the attack and allow it to leak into lagging metrics, i.e. material losses.

Although reverse engineering is still widely available, successful large-scale attacks now seem to appear out of nowhere. Scammers skip the testing phase entirely and move directly to large-scale, highly sophisticated exploitation in just a few days.

How can they take action so quickly? While the rise of generative AI for creating persuasive text and images certainly plays a role, there is a more fundamental problem: information asymmetry.

Unlike financial institutions that must navigate a maze of regulations and privacy concerns, fraudsters operate without borders; They share techniques and stolen data on dark web forums and encrypted channels. You’ll be surprised (or maybe not) at how easy it is to find scam guides on major communications apps (though I don’t recommend trying). They learn in real time, refining their tactics with each failed or successful attempt, and this intelligence is rapidly distributed globally.

Financial institutions bound by complex regulations and concerns about competitive advantage rarely exchange actionable intelligence about emerging fraud vectors. Although the financial sector is equipped with a wide range of advanced risk instruments, their scope is often narrow. While these point solutions are effective at combating certain types of fraud, they are not designed for the kind of rapid, multi-vector attacks we see today. It’s not enough to simply upgrade a risk stack to the latest and greatest vendor.

Today, fraud is no longer a single-vector attack; It is a planned, multifaceted strategy that uses information and vulnerabilities between different financial institutions. The key to combating this growing threat is cooperation.

Financial institutions must move beyond siled approaches and start sharing information in real time. If fraud attempts, suspicious patterns and new techniques are shared across organizations and sectors as soon as they are identified, fraudsters will face a much more unified and formidable defence.

Imagine how valuable it would be if, after an organization detects a new synthetic identity scam, that information could be instantly shared across a network of banks, payment processors, and fintechs. Defenses will already be in place when a fraudster tries the same tactic elsewhere. Collaborative fraud databases like the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or FS-ISAC, offer a model of how collective intelligence can shift the balance of power.

The threat posed by information asymmetry is real and time is not on our side. But by working together, leveraging real-time intelligence and sharing defenses across the industry, we can flip the script and put fraudsters on the defensive.