Fraud as an ecosystem: experts urge rules and data sharing

Interpol has warned that financial fraud is a fast-changing transnational crime and that AI-enhanced attacks deliver about 4.5 times the profits of traditional schemes. Industry specialists say fraudsters are shifting from exploiting technical flaws to targeting people through deception, and they are calling for industry-wide rules and broader data sharing.

Fraud experts report that social engineering and impersonation are now central to many scams. These attacks use information and tools that make schemes harder to detect for both consumers and institutions. According to the specialists, individual controls and consumer vigilance are often insufficient to stop these modern scams.

Responsibility for fraud prevention is spread across multiple regulatory and oversight bodies, and no single organisation has end-to-end authority. Companies have built their own prevention systems, tools and reporting routines, creating a patchwork of defenses. Experts point to inconsistent and slow data sharing as a weakness: when firms do not share suspicious-activity signals quickly and consistently, organised fraud groups can exploit the gaps.

Proposals for a standardised approach include common reporting templates, shared indicators of compromise and agreed escalation paths. Supporters say these measures could speed detection, cut down false positives and allow smaller firms to benefit from pooled intelligence. Critics caution that a single standard could impose high compliance costs on small companies, raise privacy and data-protection issues and conflict with national secrecy or competition rules.

Regulatory barriers include data-protection laws, cross-border transfer restrictions and differing mandates among financial supervisors, data-protection authorities and law-enforcement agencies. Industry participants are calling for legal clarity on safe harbors for information sharing, harmonised incident-reporting requirements and mechanisms that scale obligations to a firm’s size and resources.

Building a systemic, non-profit platform for secure data exchange would face practical and legal challenges. Developers would need to agree governance, funding, technical standards and liability protections, and to demonstrate how shared intelligence can be used without breaching privacy or competition law. Targeted regulatory reforms were identified as one way to enable limited, secure exchanges and to appoint a coordinating authority for cross-sector responses.

The topic will be discussed at a webinar hosted in association with Ecommpay. Participants will include Willem Wellinghoff, UK chair and chief compliance officer at Ecommpay, and Teresa Connors as moderator. Panelists are expected to examine how regulatory and industry changes could support wider collaboration to detect and disrupt fraud.

Interpol describes financial fraud as one of the most damaging transnational crimes with economic and human impacts, and notes that AI tools have increased scam profitability. Experts and industry figures are reviewing options for coordinated responses, data sharing and regulatory changes to address those trends.