Among the many potential uses for innovative AI tools, one that often gets overlooked is their use to identify financial fraud as a preventive measure.
Over the past several decades, financial fraud has been a consistent source of ire and frustration. Scammers, phishers, and the like have long been a painful part of consumers’ financial reality, requiring constant vigilance to avoid falling victim to malicious schemes.
However, in recent years, things have grown even more complex with the advent of modern technology. Financial fraud is no longer just a matter of stolen credit card numbers or phishing emails, as modern fraud schemes move faster, adapt quicker, and cost less to deploy than ever before.
This includes even AI-assisted invasions of privacy, such as deepfake identity documents, synthetic account creation, and real-time transaction manipulation, which are becoming standard tools for bad actors. Fortunately, though, the same AI tools that are enabling this new age of scammers can now also be used to evaluate, detect, and ultimately stop these nefarious efforts before they ever get any of your personal information.
How CORE SHIELD Fights Fraud for Nigerian Banks
Ehime Omeh, VP Marketing & Corporate Communications at Qore, notes that these fraud issues have proven especially pertinent in Nigeria of late. For Nigerian financial institutions, the stakes have recently risen.
“We’ve noticed that a lot of these fraudulent actors are really taking advantage of AI to find the weaknesses in the code that banks have built to protect themselves.”
Nigeria’s removal from the global financial “gray list” triggered sweeping new compliance mandates from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), requiring banks to strengthen their anti-money-laundering and fraud-prevention systems. Qore’s CORE SHIELD platform integrates directly into a bank’s core banking system, monitoring transactions in real time across all channels.
Omeh elaborates, “We are in conversation with clients in Mexico and India. We’re looking to expand outside Africa.”
Using a hybrid model, a rule engine for known patterns plus an AI engine that learns continuously, CORE SHIELD flags suspicious transactions for human review rather than blocking them outright, reducing false positives while auto-generating regulatory reports for the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit.
As Edidiong Etudor, Head of Product at Qore, notes, the team is “Not just relying solely on rules, because these patterns can shift, but continually getting that data and building intelligence on it.”
Deepfakes for $50: The New Fraud Landscape
At deepidv, CEO Shawn-Marc Melo is tackling fraud through identity verification. He founded the company to replace the fragmented landscape of compliance vendors with a single, modular platform covering identity verification, background checks, sanctions screening, and ongoing monitoring. But even robust verification tools face relentless adversaries.
“That’s the most important thing right now. Plugging and playing a deepfake module or anything like that is not going to cut it. You’ve got to continuously be updating with the times.”
Melo warns that AI has slashed the barrier to fraud: deepfake tools are now regularly sold at low prices, and his team updates detection datasets every two weeks just to keep pace.
“With tools going on Telegram right now, $50 to $200 in crypto or in USD, the sophistication of the deepfakes are absolutely brilliant. There’s even age verification packages being sold so you can pass those systems.”
Looking further ahead, he sees “agentic commerce fraud” as the next major battleground, attacks targeting AI agents that will soon make purchases autonomously.
“Agentic commerce fraud is probably the next sector that’s really going to get damaged. As a consumer, just be cautious about what protections neobanks have in place and who they’re using as a vendor behind the scenes to help with this.”
Final Thoughts
As fraud grows increasingly sophisticated, so do the tools needed to combat it. Financial institutions are learning that yesterday’s defenses won’t hold against tomorrow’s attacks.
The most successful AI-powered fraud detection tools have a common feature: they continually learn. Whether it’s automating compliance for banks in emerging markets or staying ahead of rapidly evolving deepfake technology through quick, biweekly updates, the objective remains consistent—in a constantly changing landscape where fraud adapts in real time, systems must evolve just as quickly.
