Ideas on fraud and fraud prevention

What we learned running fraud operations in the real world — detection, rules, metrics, and the total cost of fraud.

The Real Cost of Fraud · 8/8

For Every $1 of Fraud, You Lose Almost $4 (and You Only Measure the First)

The number you report as the cost of fraud is 25%. The real bill is 3 to 4 times larger, and almost nobody adds it up.

May 31, 2026 · 6 min read
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The Real Cost of Fraud · 7/8

Rules, Lists, Velocities, Models, Graphs: The Problem Isn't Choosing, It's Combining Them

There's no Swiss army knife in fraud prevention. Combining the techniques well produces the quality data the engine needs to decide.

May 23, 2026 · 5 min read
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The Real Cost of Fraud · 6/8

Chargebacks Are the Thermometer, Not the Disease

Chargeback rate always reaches you late. What changes when you start thinking about fraud from the attacker's side.

May 21, 2026 · 6 min read
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The Real Cost of Fraud · 5/8

False Positives: The Damage Your Fraud System Does to Your Best Customers

False positives are the invisible cost of poorly calibrated fraud prevention. How to measure them without sacrificing real fraud detection.

May 19, 2026 · 7 min read
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The Real Cost of Fraud · 4/8

Scaling the Analyst Team Doesn't Scale

75% of the fraud analyst's day happens outside the fraud product. What has to change for every team hour to land where it matters.

May 17, 2026 · 8 min read
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The Real Cost of Fraud · 3/8

Your Fraud Stack Has 5 Vendors and None of Them Talk to Each Other

Five fraud vendors that don't talk to each other cost you more than the fraud itself. What a truly integrated stack actually looks like.

May 15, 2026 · 6 min read
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The Real Cost of Fraud · 2/8

If the Attacker Uses AI, Your Static Engine Has Already Lost

Having a trained model isn't the same as having an engine that learns from the adversary at the pace the adversary learns from you.

May 14, 2026 · 7 min read
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The Real Cost of Fraud · 1/8

The Invisible Cost of Slow Response

The lag between detecting a fraud pattern and blocking it in production is the metric that defines how much fraud actually costs you.

May 13, 2026 · 6 min read
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Open Source · Dataspot

Building Dataspot: Lessons from Real-World Fraud Detection

How obsessing over fraud patterns led to an open-source tool that finds data concentrations — and why we released it to the community.

Jul 24, 2025 · 5 min read
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Fraud detection · Graphs

Graph Contamination in Fraud Detection: The Problem Nobody Talks About

Why graph-based fraud detection ends up hurting legitimate customers, and what the industry is missing about contamination by association.

Jan 3, 2025 · 5 min read
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