In a recent conversation with Peter Tapling, a long-time expert in fraud prevention, identity management, and payments innovation, we explored some of the most critical challenges facing financial institutions today when it comes to protecting customers from scams.
The biggest takeaway? You can’t fix what you don’t measure.
As scams evolve faster than ever — from social engineering to authorized push payment fraud — financial institutions must rethink not just how they detect fraud, but how they understand it. Here’s a recap of the key insights from our discussion.
The Shifting Landscape: From Unauthorized to Authorized Fraud
For decades, the financial services industry focused primarily on unauthorized fraud — protecting against stolen credentials, account takeovers, and fraudulent transactions initiated without customer consent. Today, however, the biggest threat is often authorized push payment (APP) scams, where victims themselves are manipulated into sending money directly to fraudsters.
Unlike unauthorized fraud, APP scams live in a gray area where the customer "authorizes" the transaction under false pretenses. That shift requires an entirely different approach to detection, prevention, and customer education.
Why Scam Classification is Critical
One of the most important points Peter Tapling emphasized is this: if financial institutions don’t classify scams properly, they can’t measure them — and if they can’t measure them, they can’t manage or prevent them effectively.
Without proper categorization, every scam looks like a generic "loss."
- How much are we losing to romance scams?
- How much to investment scams?
- Where are the biggest risks emerging?
Without answers to these questions, strategic action becomes guesswork. Tapling pointed to the work being done with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s Scam Classifier Model as an important step in giving institutions a standardized way to label and measure different types of scams.
“We manage what we measure. If the only thing we can say about an event is that it was a loss, we’ll never solve the problem.”
Mule Accounts and Synthetic Identities: Hidden Risks on the Receiving Side
Another major focus was the need for better monitoring and action on the receiving side of transactions.
- Mule accounts, often created using synthetic identities or legitimate customers who’ve been compromised, play a major role in facilitating scams.
- Financial institutions need policies and playbooks that empower fraud teams to act when suspicious behaviors surface — not just detect, but disrupt scam networks early.
Ignoring synthetic identities or delaying action can allow scam operations to grow unchecked.
Real-Time Payments: Balancing Speed and Safety
Today’s payment culture prizes instant gratification — tap, click, send. But fraud prevention often requires slowing things down when something looks suspicious. Tapling emphasized that while customers expect speed, introducing friction at the right moments is critical for stopping scams in flight.
Institutions must build systems that can detect "wobbly" transactions and insert intelligent pauses — giving fraud teams the chance to intervene and protect customers from high-risk transactions without creating unnecessary friction for legitimate ones.
Education Matters — But It's Not Enough
Both Tapling and I agreed: customer education about scams is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.
- Scammers evolve their tactics faster than any education campaign can keep up.
- Fraudsters study the very warnings and alerts banks issue — and then design their scams to bypass them.
Institutions must combine education with smarter technology, better detection, and proactive customer engagement — meeting the customer at the right moment, not just hoping a prior warning sticks.
The Path Forward: Collaboration, Innovation, and Customer Empowerment
Stopping scams is a shared challenge. It requires collaboration between banks, telecom providers, social media platforms, and regulators — and a mindset shift from reactive protection to proactive empowerment.
At RangersAI, we believe that empowering customers to recognize and respond to scams themselves is a critical part of the solution. That means giving them the tools, the context, and the confidence to spot scams before emotional manipulation takes hold.
The future of scam prevention isn’t just smarter systems — it’s smarter, better-supported customers.
