March 18, 2025—Visa, the global leader in payments technology, today unveiled its anti-scam practice, focused on identifying and stopping complex scams as they emerge. The new department, which operates under Visa's Payments Ecosystem Risk and Control (PERC) division, saved victims $350 million in dozens of scams last year. This is in addition to the $40 billion PERC blocked in fraud attempts on the Visa network in 2024.
“Visa has invested more than $12 billion in technology over the past five years, including technology to reduce fraud and strengthen network security,” said Paul Fabara, Visa’s global leader of Risk and Client Services. “At the same time, we’ve made a significant investment in our best weapon against fraudsters: our people. By combining our proprietary technology with the unique experiences and perspectives our talented people bring, we can more effectively identify and defeat even the most cunning fraudsters.”
Visa Scam Disruption (VSD) aims to protect consumers, customers, and businesses by leveraging Visa's extensive expertise, technologies, and partnerships:
Scam Intelligence: VSD brings together a multidisciplinary team that implements mitigation strategies to counter various scams. In addition to hiring top-tier AI engineers and developers, Visa has focused its recruiting efforts on non-traditional career paths in the fight against scams, such as former law enforcement officers, military professionals, and data visualization experts.
Proactive Scam Investigations: VSD mitigates scams through a proactive investigation process that leverages multiple channels and methodologies to identify and address scams before they inflict devastating losses on consumers.
Scam Detection and Disruption: VSD leverages cutting-edge technology and extensive proprietary network-level data to analyze and thwart scams. Investigators use generative AI tools that enable correlation and graph analysis to identify complex relationships and sift through vast amounts of data to identify truly positive and impactful scam activity. Visa then works in collaboration with financial institutions, law enforcement agencies, and third-party partners to disrupt the infrastructure of scam networks. By collaborating with key stakeholders, VSD seeks to dismantle scam operations and prevent future fraudulent activity.
In one of the largest scam networks identified so far, Visa identified fraud patterns at merchants linked to “identity verification.” Using a phishing link sent through a dating website that appeared to be a legitimate identity validation site, scammers enrolled victims in recurring billing cycles. By correlating transactions with IP data and applying advanced logic to the matched set, Visa mapped a network of merchants with similar scam attributes to identify the entire scheme infrastructure. Visa then shut down nearly 12,000 of these fraudulent merchants. This effort prevented more than $37 million in fraud losses and has been referred to law enforcement.
“Fraud is often faceless, but a scam is personal,” said Michael Jabbara, senior vice president and global leader of PERC at Visa. “These scams directly impact the lives of victims, sometimes with devastating effects. Visa also collaborates with intelligence partners, law enforcement agencies, and industry working groups to ensure that we not only stop these fraudsters, but that other members of the ecosystem are also equipped to spot red flags on their own.”