Payments industry seeks to keep pace with fraudsters

Commercial digital transactions, across the globe, don’t foster many in-person relationships. They can, however, spur fraud attempts as bad actors impersonate legitimate businesses and wreak havoc among global companies’ invoices and receivables.

TreviPay, a business-to-business payments firm based in Overland Park, Kansas, offers companies — typically those with $100 million or more in yearly sales — software solutions to onboard new customers, and prepare and submit invoices. The company also battles fraud for customers, TreviPay CEO Brandon Spear said in an interview.

TreviPay focuses on extending trade credits to buyers, typically in the form of extended payment terms that TreviPay’s seller customers may not wish to fund themselves. TreviPay operates in 32 countries and industries that include manufacturing, retail, lodging and transportation.

Spear spoke with Payments Dive on June 16. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

PAYMENTS DIVE: Please give us some detail about TreviPay’s business. 

Brandon Spear

Permission granted by TreviPay

 

BRANDON SPEAR: What we’re all about is helping sellers offer trade credits or payment terms to their business customers. And the reason that’s a complicated undertaking is that, firstly, when you offer trade credit, there’s a lot of business processes that are not necessarily well-accommodated inside your ERP (enterprise resource planning) software or inside your accounting software. So a lot of this is done manually today and done outside of those types of systems. Secondly, as we’ve seen more of a demand for global commerce, as we’ve seen the rise of things like AI, there's been a significant rise in attempted fraud. As you acquire customers online and you don’t necessarily know who they are, there’s a lot more risk these days and trying to confirm that a business is who they say they are.

What are typical trade credits companies offer their customers?

Trade credit is really one of the loyalty tools that a seller has with their buyer base. You buy something from me, and I give you 30 days to pay, or 60 days to pay, or 45 days. It’s essentially purchasing on credit. The reason this is interesting is that it’s one of the most powerful tools that a seller has to try to get their customers to spend more money with them. Obviously, you have to have a good product and a good service, and do all those sort of foundational things. But at the end of the day, one of the ways to compete with your competition is to offer trade credit terms to your buyer base. And if you do that, then hopefully they will spend more money with you. So, it’s kind of the original loyalty program, if you will, for businesses.

What’s the value proposition of your platform, given an endless number of lenders and others that could extend credit?

This whole business process is called an order-to-cash business process. And if you look at where players like banks typically play today, they only play in one very narrow portion of it, which is, do you want to get paid early? They offer funding where they if you're a merchant and you want to offer 30-day terms, but you don't have the working capital, you can go to a bank and they can essentially advance you money against your invoices, but you still have to do all of the hard work that's required to onboard a new customer, construct the correct invoice, deliver it to them, deal with disputes, and then do the application of cash at the end of the business cycle. You still have to do all of that work yourself. A big part of our value proposition is simplifying their business, allowing them to focus on what they do and take costs out. Another big part of the value proposition is increasing the share of wallet with their customer. What we’ve found is that if you do these integrations with your buyers, if you present the invoices in a manner that they want to receive them, then those customers ultimately spend more money with you because you’re easier to do business with than your competition.

What gives you headaches in your business or keeps you awake at night?

What probably scares us the most is … that there’s quite a lot of business identity theft. Nobody really writes about it. And what has held back the bad actors for a very long time is, how do they scale that activity? And I think AI is going to be transformational for fraud. It is going to allow the number of fraud scams and the sophistication of the fraud scams to just leapfrog the capabilities that many people have. And so there is going to be an AI arms race on the fraud front. And we’re watching that really carefully. And I think the dilemma here is, unless we can figure out good answers to this, it runs the risk of basically freezing new client acquisition through e-commerce channels. When you physically meet somebody and you do business with them in person, it’s really hard for a fraudster to scale that. They can’t do that. But you can set up bots that can pretend to be people and be answering emails and filling in forms. If we don’t get this right, the e-commerce channel for new client acquisition is going to get frozen, because there's going to be so much fraud. So we’re watching that really closely. It’s definitely one of the things that keeps us awake at night.

What about AI’s ability to combat fraud? Is that not a symmetrical AI arms race?

It hopefully will be. I’ll give you an example: The fraudsters today will go and create a fake website that’s one or two layers deep. And if you run a scan against it, you can see that the first layer, the first two sets of links within the website look reasonable, but then below that it’s quite junk. You can imagine, with an AI bot, you can maybe make that 10 or 15 layers deep, and it looks reasonable. So, I think there’s going to be an arms race. Hopefully, it will be symmetrical. But where it will be asymmetrical is for merchants. If you think about the average merchant, we deal with somebody that’s, say, a $500 million a year business. How much are you thinking about this? How much are you thinking about the potential for fraud and fraud escalation from AI for business customers that you might get down the road through an e-commerce channel? There’s not a lot of mind share that’s going into that yet, and so I think that’s where the asymmetry is likely to come from.

How has disruption from the Trump trade war affected your business?

We have seen a lot of unusual behavior is probably the best way to say it, where people have been stocking up on some of the parts before the price increases occur. And so we’ve seen some seasonality that I would describe as atypical. For us, big seasonal months actually happen towards the end of the summer. In the (trucking) space, people take a lot of their fleets and maintain them in the summer in anticipation of the run-up to Thanksgiving and to Christmas. They don’t want the trucks being serviced during those months because they’re super busy. We’ve seen some weird seasonality with some of what would probably happen in August, we think has actually happened in May because they brought these things forward.

Dive Brief:

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve Board and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Monday proposed taking new actions to address payments fraud, especially paper check fraud, suggesting increased agency collaboration, more industry education and improved supervision.
• The federal bank regulatory agencies offered their request for public comment over the next 90 days, saying in a joint press release that they would also look for ways to work state regulatory agencies.
• “Today's interagency announcement is a welcome first step in the efforts of the federal banking agencies to combat the increasing occurrence of fraud, particularly check fraud,” the Fed’s vice chair for supervision,  Michelle Bowman, said in the statement. “While this has been a well-known problem for several years, efforts by regulators have been slow to advance, and seem to have done little to address this growing threat.”

Dive Insight:

As part of the joint action, Bowman said in the statement that there needs to be a broader, coordinated approach to combating check fraud. She noted that she would work with state and federal agencies as well as law enforcement for the new effort.

She cited financial institutions and consumers as suffering from check fraud. “Check fraud has grown substantially over the past several years, resulting in harm to banks, especially community banks, and the consumers and businesses who are the victims of fraud,” she said.

As part of the proposal, the regulatory agencies also said in the release that they would pursue more data collection regarding fraud and opportunities for information sharing. In addition, they would review ways to use the Federal Reserve Banks’ tools and services in new ways as another means of reducing fraud.

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating federal agencies to stop using paper checks, partly because of rising fraud.

The Fed’s move comes a week after a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators pushed to address the growing problem of fraud in payments. They proposed legislation that would create a task force to study payment scams and suggest ways for lawmakers and regulators to combat them, along with formulating industry best practices.

The bill, if it moves forward in Congress, would represent one of the first formal federal efforts to combat payments fraud amid a call from professionals in financial services for a national campaign against the multi-billion-dollar problem. Payments fraud has become well-documented scourge perpetrated not only through check fraud, but also via digital avenues involving social media, online commerce and mobile text messaging.

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By Sift

Food and delivery fraud has always moved fast. But in a market shaped by instant gratification, bad actors are becoming more coordinated, automated, and harder to detect—especially for QSRs where decisions are made in milliseconds.

The Automation Arms Race

Sift’s Q1 Digital Trust Index report shows a 9% quarter-over-quarter jump in payment fraud attempts targeting food and delivery merchants. That’s a sharp uptick in an industry that already operates on tight margins and faces constant pressure to meet customer expectations for speed and convenience.

So what’s behind the rise? Collaboration between actors and democratization of abuse: organized fraud rings, AI-powered automation, and a surge in first-party fraud have reshaped risk, with food and delivery directly in the crosshairs. Sift’s data shows a 50% year-over-year spike in blocked content abuse across the network in Q1 2025, which includes fake reviews, spam submissions, and bot-driven account creation—all key precursors to more lucrative fraud.

Fraudsters use dark web tools and custom scripts to test stolen credentials, spin up synthetic identities, and farm new user promotions. These operations are efficient, scalable, and hard to track. In the span of a few days, cybercriminals can drain thousands of dollars in promo credits and reroute food deliveries tied to compromised accounts.

Credential stuffing and card testing remain core tactics. Attackers test logins at scale using leaked usernames and passwords, then cash out on accounts that store valid payment methods or loyalty points. At the operations level, fraud strains ops teams, inflates customer acquisition costs, and chips away at brand trust with every incident.

Fraud Rings > Lone Wolves

One of the most striking shifts in 2025 is the scale and coordination of attacks. What used to be isolated incidents carried out by opportunists is now being driven by connected groups working in tandem to exploit systems faster than they can be protected.

Sift’s trust and safety experts have observed fraud rings targeting multiple QSRs at once, using tactics like:

• Fake order rerouting: Placing high-value delivery orders using stolen cards, then changing the delivery address mid-journey via social engineering or hijacked accounts.
• Loyalty program farming: Automating the creation of accounts to rack up sign-up bonuses or referral rewards, which are then sold on secondary markets.
• Promo abuse at scale: Systematically targeting restaurants that run "first-time user" or BOGO campaigns, often by leveraging device spoofing and residential proxy networks to mask repeat abuse.

What was once limited to free items and exploited discounts has matured into a true threat to both dollars and data. Promotions, seasonal menu changes, and app upgrades all create a wide surface area for abuse. And when fraud goes unchecked, customer trust erodes quickly, taking future revenue with it.

First-Party Fraud’s Second Wave

While much of the conversation around fraud focuses on malicious threats, first-party fraud continues to be one of the costliest issues for food and delivery merchants. Also known as “friendly fraud,” this includes false claims around missing items, poor service, or unauthorized charges—all designed to trigger refunds or avoid payment altogether.

Globally, chargebacks have risen 27% in the past few years. Many of these likely stem from first-party abuse, which both eats into revenue and threatens relationships with payment processors. Once a business crosses the chargeback threshold set by card networks, they face steeper fees, longer investigations, and in some cases, PSP account restrictions or termination.

It’s worth reiterating that not all of this abuse is malicious; consumers may not realize that filing a chargeback instead of contacting support is considered fraud. But all fraud is greater than the sum of its parts, leaving businesses with far more to consider than revenue loss alone. Intent doesn’t change the resulting drain on operational resources, rising fraud rates, or increasing friction for legitimate customers.

AI Levels the Playing Field

Over-the-counter AI, coupled with sophisticated tactical advancements and automation, have given bad actors cover like we’ve never even imagined. Deepfakes and bot attacks are two of potentially hundreds of illicit GenAI use cases, none of which give businesses much room to react.

It’s why the most successful, secure companies aren’t reacting; they’re following the fraudster’s own playbook and adapting as disruption unfolds. That means:

• Monitoring fraud rates and transaction patterns by vertical and geography, not just in aggregate
• Implementing layered defenses like device intelligence velocity checks and behavioral analytics
• Educating operations teams on gray-area abuse, while reinforcing clear policies around refunds and promotions

The takeaway? Managing fraud in food and delivery isn’t just about blocking bad actors. It’s about building systems that can scale with your business, deliver fast and frictionless experiences to trusted users, and adapt to the tactics that are reshaping fraud before it eats your revenue.

Explore all Q2 fraud data and consumer insights from Sift’s latest report, Navigating Digital Trust in the Age of AI.

Dive Brief:

• Four U.S. senators are proposing legislation that would create a task force to study payment scams and suggest ways for lawmakers and regulators to combat them, along with formulating industry best practices.
• The Task Force for Recognizing and Averting Payments Scams Act was announced Tuesday by Senators Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican, and Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat. The Federal Trade Commission reported that Americans had lost $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25% annual jump, which the senators cited in their announcement.
• “We can—and should—better equip law enforcement and regulators with the tools to go after scammers and prevent scams before they happen," Crapo said Tuesday in a news release announcing the bill. Senators Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, and Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, have signed on as co-sponsors.

Dive Insight:

The bill, if it moves forward in Congress, would represent one of the first formal federal efforts to combat payments fraud. The problem is well-documented and a much-battled scourge across the payments industry. Social media, online commerce, mobile text messaging and other digital platforms have allowed scammers to innovate in targeting consumers.

Under the legislation, the Treasury Department would chair the task force, which would also include staff from the Justice Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Communications Commission and the FTC, plus industry representatives.

The task force would be expected “to examine the payments landscape” and recommend changes to existing laws and regulations, per the senators’ news release. The task force would also suggest best practices to coordinate anti-fraud efforts at the state, federal and local levels.

The task force would be required to update its report every three years.

About 2.6 million consumers reported fraud incidents last year, roughly the same as in 2023, according to the FTC. However, monetary loss associated with these frauds surged from affecting roughly a quarter of victims (27%) in 2023 to 38% last year, the agency said. Impostor scams represented the largest area of fraud, followed by scams related to online shopping, per the FTC.

Multiple industry associations support the legislation, according to the senators’ press release, including the AARP; the American Bankers Association; and the Electronic Transactions Association.

“A task force will definitely help because you’re bringing together all of the entities who are working on this and it puts them in the same room,” Scott Talbott, a spokesman for the Electronic Transactions Association said Wednesday. “The thieves thrive on divide and conquer and it will take everybody working in concert to fight this fight.”

The ETA has previously pushed Congress for additional law enforcement funding, but the fraud task force is “the first step” for a coordinated effort to battle payments fraud, he said.

“A whole-of-government approach is critically important to make a meaningful difference toward protecting the hardworking Americans we’re all working to serve,” Consumer Bankers Association CEO Lindsey Johnson said Wednesday in an emailed statement.

In 2023, payments fraud losses in the Americas were tabulated at $102.6 billion, according to a 2024 report from the research firms Oliver Wyman and Celent. 

The issue represents “a national challenge” for consumers, law enforcement, regulators and the payments industry, a Zelle general manager, Denise Leonhard, said in February at a payments fraud conference presented by Banking Dive and Payments Dive.

Financial institutions are facing a flood of fraud, from push-payment scams to business email compromises to bad checks. Nonetheless, they’re often stymied in trying to work together to root out bad actors.

That was painfully clear to attendees listening to several panel discussions at the Nacha Smarter Faster Payments conference last month. The industry event attracted about 2,100 payments, bank and credit union professionals between April 27 and April 30 in New Orleans.

Push-payment schemes, also known as credit-push fraud, that move over Nacha’s ACH and other electronic payment rails have been particularly problematic. In these situations, consumers and companies are duped into sending payments to criminals under false pretenses, but because they do so voluntarily, it’s more difficult to combat. 

It’s become a pain point partly because the financial system revolves around monitoring for crooks sending payments, not those receiving them. Today, “mule” accounts belonging to unsuspecting holders are used by criminals to receive funds that are quickly drained.

Payments fraud in the U.S. is a multi-billion-dollar problem, especially among elderly consumers, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Fraudsters tap social media and artificial intelligence to their advantage to prey on consumers and corporate clients alike, with schemes becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Tim Thorson, a senior vice president of payments risk at Regions Bank, lamented the problem during a Nacha panel discussion regarding that organization’s plan to implement new rules addressing fraud.
“Credit-push fraud can take a small business down, and I've seen it happen, and I know probably many people in here have, and that's an extremely anti-social thing to happen to a small business, because the country's built on small businesses,” Thorson said.

Perceived legal barriers

Part of the problem is that federal and state laws intended to protect customer confidentiality and thwart money-laundering may be interpreted in ways that hamper communication between financial institutions. 

“I wish there was something that we could do amongst ourselves that would amount to something of a safe harbor, where we could talk to each other the way we used to before all the privacy laws came down 25 years ago,” Thorson said. “We're still paranoid about divulging the information on a mule (account), for instance, on somebody clearly taking money that didn't belong to them.”

Fraudsters aren’t protected by such laws, but it’s often difficult to determine quickly whether fraud between different institutions’ accounts is happening. That’s where more communication might help.

“One of the things that we identify as a potential roadblock to some potential sharing is just the sense that folks are not clear what they can share with law enforcement, and how really, they can work together to try and make a broader difference,” Scott Anchin, a vice president of operational risk and payments policy at the Independent Community Bankers of America, said during a separate panel discussion.

Anchin’s trade group created a task force with representatives from some 50 community banks nationwide to discuss fraud, he said during the panel focused on enabling institutions to work together. The cohort has also partnered with the non-profit International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators to create a guide for bank members, he said.

Financial institutions’ ‘cultural’ problem

Even though banks share staff contact information through a Nacha registry designed to connect workers from different banks and credit unions, such registries aren’t always complete or up to date, often frustrating employees who try to use them. 

All too often bank employees trying to reach industry peers may have access only to a customer service line that devolves into a series of deadends. The situation may become more difficult when banks are intermediaries for unlisted fintechs.

Nacha panelists noted a “cultural” problem in the industry with banks and workers not interested in talking to peers, for whatever reason, including potentially competitive instincts. 

“Instead of putting your direct line (in the registry), you put the call-tree-hell (number) because you hope that nobody will sit through it, but that doesn't get us anywhere,” said William Mills, a vice president for deposit and ACH operations at Premier Banks in Maplewood, Minnesota.

Mills, who spoke on the Nacha rule panel, said he endured conversations with 18 different bank representatives at a large financial institution over four hours to resolve one issue.

Conference attendees suggested larger institutions may be more guarded because they’re seeking to safeguard their proprietary data.

When asked about banks sharing information to combat fraud during an interview earlier this month, JPMorgan Chase’s payments technology head, Sri Shivananda, pointed to the government as the linchpin for information-sharing, via the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. 

As for JPMorgan’s role, he seemed to favor maintaining an edge on rivals. “We have a competitive advantage on the data that we see through the number of transactions that we support on the platform,” he said.

Missing government coordination

A major government public campaign to call attention to the rising fraud problem, or to address it, has been lacking, some panelists contended. 

There is no federal government office coordinating a response to this multi-billion-dollar crisis, said Paul Benda, an executive vice president of risk, fraud and cybersecurity policy for the American Bankers Association. The situation reflects a “complete and utter failure” of the national government to spearhead a nationwide solution, he said.

For its part, Nacha is implementing new rules to address the mushrooming payments fraud, asking financial institution members to submit plans for procedural changes. The rules aimed at changing financial institutions’ processes and policies are being phased in, with additional deadlines next year.

Unfortunately, many financial institutions aren’t ready to make the improvements, according to Dominic Plumeri, who audits banks on the ACH Network in his role as vice president of member services at not-for-profit payments association Southern Financial Exchange.

Nacha is also seeking to spur more information-sharing among its members by adding a new online means of connecting with each other to report fraud and attempt to recover funds. 

In addition, some financial institutions are turning to outside software vendors to help develop technology to flag potential account problems, sometimes based on changes in payment behavior, like increases in volumes or values being received or sent by customers.

In the meantime, though, speakers at the conference said they fear losses are contributing to an expansion of organized crime rings, fueling the problem.

Karen Helmberger, director of fintech and payments at the industry fraud-fighting organization FS-ISAC, emphasized the personal and financial tolls the crimes take on people.

“We are losing generational wealth across the sector in this country and it’s going to these scam facilities wherever they may be,” said Helmberger. She urged attendees to focus not on the uncomfortable feelings they have about communicating, but rather on the “really bad things” that happen when they don’t.

JPMorgan Chase attributes many push payment scams to fraudulent activity that starts on social media platforms, an executive for the bank's payments arm said.

"The proliferation on social media platforms and marketplaces, and the comfort of consumers with transacting on those platforms, have resulted in significantly more fraud occurring through those vehicles," said Greg Hodges, head of trust and safety at JPMorgan Payments. 

The executive for the largest U.S. bank made the comments during the Fighting Payments Fraud in 2025 virtual event hosted by Payments Dive and Banking Dive last week when asked about scams that begin with interactions on social media, specifically Facebook.

About half of scams reported to Chase originate on social media sites. The bank said recently that it will soon stop allowing payments that originate on social media platforms and sent through the Zelle peer-to-peer instant payment network. Zelle is operated by Early Warning Services, which is owned by seven banks, including JPMorgan Chase.

“We’ll decline those transactions because Zelle is meant to pay friends, family and other trusted recipients you know, not for others you meet on social media,” the website says.

The change will take effect on March 23, and Chase may begin asking about payment information to help protect customers, a spokesperson said.

The company is updating its terms to help customers protect themselves against scams “that overwhelmingly originate from contact through social media platforms,” a spokesperson for the bank said by email.

A push-payment scam happens when a bad actor contacts an unsuspecting consumer and persuades that consumer to send them money. The money may be sent through any number of payment channels, including possibly over a peer-to-peer payment network or a real-time payment network.

Contact between the bad actor and the consumer often begins on social media platforms or online marketplaces, Hodges said.

The bank currently deals with this problem by warning consumers about possible scams before the transaction occurs, he said. 

"The opportunity to detect and mitigate (scams) isn't on the (social media) platform itself, it actually occurs at the time of payment," Hodges said.

Peer-to-peer and real-time payment networks, which scammers are increasingly using to orchestrate scams, are the digital equivalent of paying cash, he said. 

"Once you use those approaches to moving money, it becomes extremely difficult — but not impossible — to recover that money, which is why it's become such an attractive mechanism for fraud" and scams, Hodges said.

In addition to giving customers access to the Zelle network, JPMorgan can offer real-time payment services through FedNow and the RTP Network operated by The Clearing House.

Consumer advocates have criticized financial institutions and payments providers for not doing enough to make fraud victims whole. 

Last year, lawmakers castigated companies like Early Warning Services in letters to banks and aggressively questioned bank executives in committee hearings.

Customers of Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan disputed  about $206.7 million worth of Zelle transactions in 2023 on the grounds that they were scammed, according to a U.S. Senate report from July 2024. Only about 19% of those transactions were reimbursed, the report said.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also sued Zelle and three of its bank owners in December, alleging customers of those banks have lost $870 million to fraud and scams over the network's seven-year lifespan.

EWS countered that it has been effective in its fighting against fraud and called the lawsuit misguided. The bureau's acting director, Russ Vought, halted all work at the agency earlier this month, leaving the future of the case in doubt.

JPMorgan employs artificial intelligence to spot transactions that are out of the ordinary and keeps users of its real-time payment systems informed about scam tactics, Hodges said.

The bank's website includes educational information on recognizing and avoiding push payments scams, Hodges noted. 

"We have some information about the types of scams that are out there and what to be aware of, and some online do's and don’ts," he said. 

For its part, Early Warning Services has also tried to sound the alarm about consumers sending payments to contacts they meet on social media sites and in digital marketplaces. When consumers don’t know people on those sites asking for a payment, it should raise “red flags,” Denise Leonhard, Zelle’s general manager, said during one of the panel discussions during the virtual event.

“Some of these channels, they do start to open up that opportunity for criminals to be able to reach out,” Leonhard said. “My advice would just be, obviously, to only send money to people that you know and trust, because we do see fraud begin in those places where people don't necessarily know each other.”