This page may contain stale information. Last updated: 2026-08-03
Definition
Fraud where an attacker gains control of a legitimate user’s banking or payment account — via stolen credentials, social engineering, malware or session hijacking — and initiates unauthorized activity.
Key Points
- Often paired with scams and money-mule networks; visa cites ATO/scams costing >$1T annually (PR framing)
- Generative AI lowers cost of convincing social engineering (ai-scaled-scams)
- Defenses: behavioral-biometrics, passkeys, transaction risk models, multi-signal-fraud-intelligence