Fighting Fraud Requires Industry-Wide Data Sharing

Interpol has described financial fraud as “one of the world’s most severe and rapidly evolving transnational crimes, with significant economic and human consequences,” and estimates AI-enhanced scams are 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. Industry experts say fraudsters increasingly target human vulnerabilities with social engineering, deepfakes and automated messaging, which can make attacks harder for consumers and firms to detect.

Multiple regulatory and oversight bodies have responsibilities that touch on fraud prevention, and no single entity has end-to-end authority. Experts point to inconsistent reporting standards, differing privacy rules and commercial sensitivities as barriers to sharing fraud data across organisations and sectors. Those barriers fragment the response and slow efforts to identify coordinated criminal activity.

Proposals under discussion include harmonised reporting standards, legal safe harbors for data sharing in fraud prevention and centralised incident registries. Industry participants say implementing such measures would require changes to existing laws and international cooperation. They add that any unified framework would need proportional requirements so small firms are not subject to the same compliance burdens as large institutions.

Some participants favour common detection indicators and response protocols to speed information flow and reduce duplicated effort. Others caution that uniform standards may not suit all business models, could impose costs on smaller firms and raise new privacy and liability questions. Building a trusted non-profit platform to coordinate data and response has been proposed, but governance, funding, legal authority and cross-border reach remain unresolved.

A webinar hosted in association with payments firm Ecommpay will examine these issues. Willem Wellinghoff, UK chair and chief compliance officer at Ecommpay, will join the session and Teresa Connors will act as moderator. The discussion will cover practical steps for industry collaboration, regulatory roadblocks and whether a systemic non-profit solution could improve coherence in fraud prevention.

Background material indicates a shift in tactics over recent years from exploiting software and network flaws to targeting people directly. Industry observers say that without clearer data-sharing arrangements and better regulatory alignment, fraud losses and related human impacts could increase as criminals scale AI-assisted operations.