Visa: AI Helped Block 80 Million Fraudulent Transactions in 2023

Visa’s investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology reportedly enabled the payments processor to block 80 million fraudulent transactions worth $40 billion in 2023.

Charles Lobo, regional risk officer for Visa in Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, shared these figures with Reuters, according to a report posted Tuesday (July 23).

“Now despite that, there’s still a lot of bad that’s happening,” Lobo said, per the report.

Over the past five years, worldwide, Visa has invested over $10 billion in technology, including $500 million on AI and data infrastructure to guard against fraudulent activity, according to the report.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that an increasing number of financial institutions are deploying AI and machine learning (ML) tools to combat fraud.

Those efforts appear to be working, as financial institutions that now use AI or ML to mitigate fraud are seeing steep declines in common forms of fraud, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and Hawk collaboration, “Leveraging AI and ML to Thwart Scammers.”

Visa said in May that it launched an AI-powered real-time fraud detection service in the United Kingdom, aiming to prevent account-to-account (A2A) fraud.

The company made this “Visa Protect for A2A Payments” service available to all banks in the U.K. after a pilot program in which it found an additional 54% of fraud beyond that identified by banks’ fraud prevention systems.

Also in May, Visa launched a generative AI solution designed to help issuers combat enumeration attacks — card testing attacks in which threat actors use automated scripts, botnets and other technologies.

Visa’s tool can learn normal and abnormal transaction patterns, identify the likelihood of complex enumeration attacks in real time and help clients use the risk score in their authorization decisioning when used with a rule engine.

In March, Visa said it would use AI in a trio of new applications within its fraud and risk management technologies platform to protect issuers, merchants and consumers.

“We’re continuing to invest to make the Visa credentials as secure as possible — and to extend that protection more broadly across the payments ecosystem,” James Mirfin, senior vice president and global head of risk and identity solutions at Visa, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster.