It was a typical weekday at a private bank in Europe, and a customer had set up a transfer of €60,000. The customer wasn’t a hacker or a bot but an actual human who had willingly clicked “approve” to send money from their bank account. But the payment never went through.
And that’s a good thing.
Behind the scenes and in real time, the bank checked the receiving account against a list of accounts confirmed to belong to scammers. When a match popped up, the bank was able to intervene.
That intelligence came from Cybera, a startup that tackles a pervasive weakness in scam prevention: By the time a victim reports they’ve been scammed, the money is already gone and almost impossible to trace. By proactively identifying where the money is going, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Claudio Staub says, he can stop scams in their tracks.
That’s because, Staub says, “Every scam involving the transfer of funds ultimately ends in a payment.”
Instead of trying to determine whether a customer is being manipulated, New York-based Cybera identifies the accounts that criminals use to collect and then quickly launder money. To find them, it uses AI-generated personas that engage scammers and gather payment details, “using AI for good to combat scams at scale,” Staub says.
Cybera’s Money Mule Intelligence is now available through Recorded Future, the threat intelligence company owned by Mastercard, helping fraud teams identify in real time the bank accounts that criminals use to move illicit funds so that financial institutions can use the intelligence to prevent the transfers.
It’s another weapon in Mastercard’s arsenal of fraud intelligence, including Consumer Fraud Risk, which gives both sending and receiving banks real-time risk insights into account-to-account payments, and Decision Intelligence Pro, which applies advanced AI and graphing algorithms to cardholders’ behavior to help issuers assess transaction risk, detect fraud and approve more genuine transactions in real time.
