How To Fight financial fraud with Artificial Intelligence

Christopher
6 min readMar 31, 2021

With monetary wrongdoing on the increment, recognizing and moderating extortion has become a need across monetary administrations. Banks are currently taking a gander at how they can improve measures, use information all the more viably and tackle new advancements to expand computerization and empower better dynamics.

financial fraud

The use of AI to fight financial fraud, both internal and external, has become a hot topic. “AI is the future of fraud management, irrespective of the system you are using”

Types of fraud in business:

  • Fraud comes in many forms but can be broken down into three categories: misappropriation of assets, corruption, and fraud in financial statements. Asset misappropriation, although less costly, accounted for 90% of all the fraud cases studied.
  • These are schemes in which an employee steals or exploits the resources of his organization. Examples of misappropriation of assets include stealing cash before or after recording, making false claims for reimbursement of expenses, and/or taking non-cash assets of the organization.

• Financial Statement fraud accounted for less than five percent of the cases but resulted in the most median loss. These are schemes that involve omitting or intentionally missing information in the company’s financial reports. This may be in the form of fictitious revenues, hidden liabilities, or inflated assets.

  • Corruption fell in the middle and accounted for less than one-third of the cases. Corruption schemes occur when employees use their influence in business transactions to their advantage while violating their duty to the employer. Examples of corruption include bribery, extortion, and conflict of interest.
financial fraud
  • You might be impressed by the employees who haven’t missed a working day in years. While they may seem like loyal employees, it could be a sign that these employees have something to hide and are worried that someone will detect their fraud if they have been out of office for some time.
  • It is also a good idea to turn employees into different jobs within a company. This may also reveal fraudulent activity since it allows a second employee to review the activities of the former.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has caused a great deal of discomfort in the banking world. As an industry heavily dependent on manual labor, it took a considerable amount of time to acclimate to the digital world. Safety was one of the many factors they had to consider as they first walked into a completely digital business model. Fighting fraud and financial crime was crucial.

The banking industry, which is considered to be the backbone of the economy, needs to keep going regardless of the crisis. Other growing sectors depend on them to reach out and pull them out of such uncertain crises. The implementation of the digital format will result in the storage of a large amount of financial data and track records in digital format for various entities and customers. This consolidated, wide range of data will continue to be at the risk of fraudsters and cybercriminals.

Role of Technology in Combating Fraud and Crimes:

Technology, especially in the form of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and machine learning, is a bonus in the fight against fraud and cybercrime. The learning methodology or algorithms are most useful for predicting these attacks by looking for patterns that raise suspicion. In addition, these algorithms help to prevent illicit transfers and alert the system to a wide range of cyberattacks. These algorithms can analyze a variety of patterns and predict all combinations of attacks, thus helping financial organizations to develop risk mitigation and management strategy.

financial fraud

AI algorithms are used to map credit card applications and detect illicit purchases or shadowy transfers of money. With the help of their bank details, the algorithm can track fraudsters and record the money trail that exposes the criminals.

Artificial Intelligence is used to monitor the credit and debit activities of the accounts and alert the unnatural balance of accounts or expenditure records. Both the Intrusion Detection System and the Intrusion Prevention Systems are now automated using AI, which has led to a significant decrease in human error vulnerabilities.

How AI Helps Fraud Prevention in Banking and Finance:

Frauds remain the biggest challenge for the banking industry and its clients, leading to massive losses every year. Credit card is the most prevalent form of fraud and, according to one study, 270,000 cases of credit card fraud happened in 2019 alone. Most of the scams occurred with retail consumers, but companies and sometimes even banks have directly experienced massive losses following such fraud cases.

financial fraud

The financial business is now using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology to intercept these frauds as quickly as possible to stop them from happening. Let us see some of the key areas where AI is extensively used to identify or prevent financial fraud.

Fraudulent purchases

Cybercriminals often obtain bank account details or credit card details through different means and use them to do illegal transactions and siphon off the victim’s accounts. If transfers are not halted quickly, it becomes impossible to reclaim money and is frequently lost permanently.

Banks are now implementing machine learning algorithms that can detect irregular transactions in almost real-time, avoid them from occurring automatically, and alert the authorities.

Phishing Scams

Cybercriminals target vulnerable people by sending them email links that claim to be mail from their bank. By clicking on a link, criminals can access their confidential banking or card information for fraudulent transactions. As per the new report of the computer protection firm ProofPoint, 9.2 million malicious emails were obtained from users in 2020. And, sadly, about 30 percent of phishing emails are available to vulnerable targets.

financial fraud

While banks are not directly involved in preventing such phishing scams, credit goes to email companies like Google. They already have sophisticated machine learning algorithms that warn the customer that this is a phishing mail and should not be clicked or sent to the spam box instead. Gmail’s machine learning blocks more than 10 million spam and malicious emails per minute.

False Insurance Claims

It is not rare for insurance providers to receive fraudulent insurance reports from persons and companies. If such allegations are not identified in advance, insurance firms could wind up paying insurance money to the scam claimant. Research estimates that insurance fraud results in a loss of at least $80 billion annually across all insurance lines, and the US alone saw a loss of $34 billion in 2019. One-third of the insurers conclude that fraud accounts for up to 20 percent of the premiums’ cost.

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Christopher

I am a technology blogger, who loves to read and write on the latest in technology.