Whenever my mum comes to the US and we go to a restaurant, she never lets her credit card out of her sight - insisting on following the waiter all the way to the register.

They always look baffled, but she might actually be onto something! In-person fraud rates in the US are much higher than in Europe.

Why is card fraud so prevalent?
We share our 16-digit card numbers everywhere - is that safe?
How do merchants actually protect this data?

To dig into all of this, I spoke to Colin Luce, CEO at Basis Theory, and it turns out there's a quiet power struggle happening.

Visa and MasterCard want merchants to rely on their tokens and delete the original card data.

Merchants don't trust what comes next.

Once you give up that data, you can't switch processors, you can't negotiate, you take whatever pricing the networks decide.

We also discussed in the podcast:

- Why agentic commerce isn't really a payments revolution
- Why MasterCard are getting rid of the PAN
- Whether consumers care about card fraud
- How your Stripe token is useless with Adyen

What do you think Delaware's third largest source of revenue is?

Props to you if you knew it was escheatment.

This is the craziest area of financial compliance I’ve learnt about in a long time, and my head is still reeling from my chat with Allen Osgood, CEO of Eisen.

What started out as me wondering what would happen to the Bitcoin that I can’t access (moved country, changed phone number…) turned into a mind bending story of a man who lost all of his Amazon stock (bye bye nice retirement), how claiming your own money back from states has become rife with fraud, and how there are $70bn of funds being held by US states that they just make money off and use to fill budget.

Madness!

Consumer losses from fraud jumped from $3.4B to $12.5B between 2020-2024. That's a 270% increase! Should we be worried about what lies ahead?

Back when I was Head of Financial Crime at Monzo, I watched fraudsters pump tens of thousands of pounds of petrol using cards with just £100 on them. We had their names, addresses, photos - everything! But the police didn't know what to do with it.

And that was before AI changed everything.

Now Yuliya Kazakevich, who's led fraud teams at Charles Schwab, Apple, Adyen, Cash App, and Lithic, is watching fraud evolve in ways that genuinely concern her.

And if someone with her experience is worried, we should all be paying attention!

It was great to welcome Yuliya on the pod to discuss all of this. Here’s what we covered:

• Whether AI companies should be liable for enabling fraudsters
• Why JP Morgan is opening more branches
• How AI is scaling fraud to terrifying new levels
• The shift from unauthorised to authorised fraud
• How law enforcement is overwhelmed and under-resourced to tackle fraud

Fraud is evolving faster than we can keep up - and we need to start paying attention.