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Succeeding with VAMP: The Acquirer and Merchant Reality Check
Karisse Hendrick, host of the Fraudology Podcast, will set the tone of the conference by discussing the current state of online fraud, how we arrived here, and how we can prepare for the future of fraud attacks.
As fraudsters leverage sophisticated AI to bypass digital verification systems, traditional defenses are falling short. In this session, Eduardo Pires, Director of Fraud Solutions at Incognia, explores how deepfakes and AI-generated images are reshaping the threat landscape, why standalone deepfake detection is no longer sufficient, and how grounding identity in the physical world builds a stronger defense. Attendees will gain practical insights into evolving attack techniques and learn how to future-proof their fraud strategy.
Merchants rarely get to learn about chargebacks on the "other side of the fence". This session is your opportunity to learn from two major issuers, along with Auriemma Roundtables (a data consortium for banks) what issuers see when they look at their chargeback data. What do they care about, how they view "first-party abuse," and what advice they have for merchants to reduce their own chargeback volume & win more representments.
There's no doubt that 2- and 3- sided marketplaces have many surface areas to consider when reducing fraud and abuse on their platforms. This merchant-only roundtable-style session is an opportunity for fraud leaders working for marketplaces to share their own pain points and issues, ask for advice from their peers, and gain lasting connections for outreach year round.
In the last year, AI capabilities have skyrocketed. Naturally, Fraudsters are experimenting & utilizing AI to facilitate more fraud, faster and cheaper than they could ever do before. Because AI can identify gaps and vulnerabilities on your website faster than most engineering teams, they are hitting your company hard. You just may not realize it yet. In this session, you’ll see real world examples of AI enabled fraud attacks targeting ecommerce merchants and marketplaces. You’ll learn how to better identify fraud caused by AI products, and ways to slow it down without impacting your legitimate customers.
Buckle up, as we bring 4 early stage start-ups to the stage for a pitch style educational session on how their tech can help merchants. Spanning use cases and technology types, there’s a little bit of something for everyone in this session. Our goal is to raise visibility for the future tech you may not have heard of yet.
What does a modern Fraud Center of Excellence really look like and where are the gaps holding teams back? In this interactive session, we’ll explore how fraud leaders are evolving their operating models across people, process, technology, data, and cross-functional influence. We’ll dig into how teams are using AI to augment fraud operations and reduce manual work, while also discussing where human expertise remains critical. This won’t be a traditional presentation. Come ready to join the conversation, share what’s working (and what isn’t), and learn how your peers are approaching the same challenges as we collectively explore what the next generation of Fraud Centers of Excellence could look like.
One of the biggest challenges that fraud teams & leaders face isn't the fraud attacking their business from the outside. It's the internal battles with other departments. Over the last decade +, the fraud team at Best Buy has overhauled how they used to talk to and try to work with cross-functional teams including marketing, growth/sales, customer service, etc. Instead of adversaries, they have now formed successful partnerships with those departments. In this session, Jen Renner, Manager of Enterprise Fraud Decisioning at Best Buy will share some of the secrets of their success. (It might be easier than you think!)
Honed by countless hours of analysis and investigation, fraud, risk, and trust & safety professionals have a sixth sense for risk. But threat actors are generating more signals to sift through than any team can keep pace with manually. Drawing on real-world examples, this session will cover how teams are training, tuning, and auditing AI-based tools for their own context. The speakers will discuss how to make sure AI outputs are grounded in reality, where AI belongs in the decision chain today, and where it doesn't.
Panelists will talk about the different types of non-payment abuse such as: referral farming, free-trial cycling, loyalty and discount/promo abuse, etc. What are the economic impacts of non-payment abuse that hits marketing spend, customer service, and inventory, instead of receiving chargebacks? How can you quantify their impact without a firm feedback loop, such as chargebacks? How can you demonstrate their impact to the business to cross-functional teams and senior leadership?
For years, the most important chargeback metrics for online merchants have been their win/loss rate. Recovering revenue was a top priority for fraud teams, so many assumed it was for their C-Suite. And while high win rates should still be the goal of a chargeback management program, Enterprise merchants are learning what their C-Suite really wants to learn from chargeback data. Afterall, chargebacks are the ultimate feedback loop from your customers. In this session, you will learn the rich amount of data that can be gleaned from chargebacks, what your executives want to know, and how you can present this information to them, before they even ask.
This session will focus on utilizing verification as a targeted intervention rather than a gate. When used as a targeted approach, your legitimate customers will not be impacted as much as they would if the friction applied to all users. We will also discuss the various instances where online merchants use selective friction, such as step-up triggers, marketplace and high-value seller onboarding, KYB/KYC, and linking identity signals to serial perpetrators. This is an interactive session, and we welcome discussion and questions.
Where fraud is occurring within the customer’s interaction/journey across your website is changing. Fraud no longer occurs just at the time of transaction or at the time of login. It is moving upstream and downstream from those points of contact. And not all merchants are prepared for this, resulting in an uptick of online fraud attacks.
How can merchants look at their entire customer journey and assess where the needs exist for additional controls? When looking at the issues, are these self-inflicted wounds or actual risk gaps? -How you address them depends on the answer. And finally, how are different entities within the online payment ecosystem addressing these changes in fraud behaviors and risk surfaces?
Account Takeovers are plaguing online merchants with lost revenue, loyalty fraud and loss of brand trust. And the ATO attack methods of today are not the same as in 2016. They’ve grown to be more sophisticated and technical. The panelists in this session will talk about how ATOs impact their businesses, how the fraudster “playbook” has changed and how to use the right data to identify ATOs before they cost you and your customers time and money.
Conveying the seriousness and benefits of a sophisticated anti-fraud strategy has historically been difficult for fraud leaders to communicate to their executives. C-Suite execs are usually looking at the big picture and inherently care about different aspects of the business than just fraud. In this session, senior fraud leader Holly Sandberg will share which metrics executives care about most, how to best display them in a slide deck, and provide tips to share the metrics and valuable data that can’t be provided by other departments.
Over the last 6 years, a new typography of fraud has emerged for retail and food delivery companies. Refund abuse. While these are sometimes handled by customer service or result in chargebacks, fraud teams have been assigned this problem to solve. In this collaborative deep dive, Sudhir Lanka of GrubHub will provide some of the ways he’s seen refund abuse morph and scale. He’ll also share some of the counter measures GrubHub has put in place to make it more difficult to claim “not delivered” or “damaged”. Attendees will also have the opportunity to share their own pain points and solutions with their peers.
In a world where build vs. buy has increasingly turned into build AND buy - How are merchants deciding which to build and which to buy? What are the advantages and disadvantages to a hybrid approach of 3rd party tools and in-house tools? How are vendors partnering with their clients to make the most of hybrid vendor/in house combo risk stacks?
As fraud continues to shift upstream and downstream of a payment transaction (checkout), more fraud teams are learning the importance of ingesting data points that were once exclusive to cyber teams. But could working closer with your cyber team actually improve your success metrics? In this session, the presenters will provide an overview of a recent study published by Liminal and Accertify about the convergence of fraud and cyber. They will also provide real world examples of a fraud team that greatly reduced account takeovers by ingesting cyber signals.
Account takeover rarely looks suspicious in a single moment. In this session, we’ll explore how connecting identity, device, behavioral, and transaction signals across the merchant or customer journey can reveal risk that point-in-time checks miss. We’ll unpack how to recognize when “normal” actions form an abnormal pattern, and what organizations can do to detect and stop ATO earlier.
Merchants and PSPs are tied to each other in several ways, especially after the implementation of Visa’s VAMP program. But, are you getting all of the benefits you can by working closely with your PSP to better understand and reduce payment fraud? In this session, you will explore areas of fraud risk that aren’t being talked about enough between Merchants and their Payment Service Providers (PSPs), as the gaps are enabling the growing fraud crisis. You will also learn how Fraud Governance can be the catalyst needed to reduce fraud risk losses. Many online companies don’t have an official Payments Fraud Governance function. And it could just be the missing piece to make the fraud strategy, analytics, and operations team’s lives easier.
There is no doubt that AI is impacting retail fraud in a significant way. Just this year, we’ve seen an uptick in card testing, account takeovers, and scams targeting consumers to purchase gift cards. These are just a few of the topics that will be discussed in this session. This merchant-only roundtable-style session is an opportunity for fraud leaders working for retailers to share their own pain points and issues, ask for advice from their peers, and gain lasting connections for outreach year round.
Fraud-as-a-service has removed the “gating factor”, allowing everyday people, without any real fraud skills or experience, to commit fraud. Instead of learning every step of the fraud cycle, it’s now easier than ever to hire someone or use AI to execute each step in the fraud process. Join Steve Diamond of the RH-ISAC as he provides examples and expertise in the black market of fraud. Steve will also talk about how he built a fraud threat intelligence program when he worked for a merchant that was successful in catching new & emerging fraud trends.
Merchant Fraud Alliance kicks off at 8:15am Tuesday morning (10/6) with breakfast and concludes at 4:30pm Wednesday (10/7) with closing remarks. This will help you plan travel and we'll have an agenda with times up ASAP!
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