Consumers lost $2.1 billion to scams that started on social media last year.
Meta Facebook accounted for more reported scam losses than any other social platform - but by the time payment hits a bank or PSP, the scam often already looks like a normal authorized transaction.
Idan Hayon
Co-Founder & CEO
Consumers lost $2.1 billion to scams that started on social media last year.
Meta Facebook accounted for more reported scam losses than any other social media platform.
The interesting part is where the scam ends.
By the time the payment reaches a bank, PSP, or fraud system, the fraud has often already happened. The victim has spent days or even weeks building trust with the fraudster. They’ve been persuaded, manipulated, and convinced the payment is legitimate.
From the payment provider’s perspective, everything can look perfectly normal.
The customer initiates the payment, the device is recognised, authentication succeeds, and the credentials are valid. The transaction itself isn’t necessarily suspicious.
That’s why scam prevention is becoming fundamentally different from traditional fraud prevention.
Historically, fraud systems focused on identifying unauthorised activity. Today, one of the biggest challenges is identifying authorised payments that should never have happened.
That’s a much harder problem.
Social media platforms, banks, payment providers, and fraud vendors each see a different part of the customer journey. The challenge is connecting those signals before the money leaves the account.
As scams become more sophisticated and fraudsters operate at greater scale, reacting after the payment is no longer enough. The focus has to move upstream.
From simply analysing the transaction to understanding the behaviour that led to it.
If you want to understand how fraud and dispute patterns show up in your own payment data - not only after the chargeback - book a FraudPulse walkthrough.
FAQ
- Why are social media scams hard for payment fraud systems to catch?
- By the time money moves, the victim often believes the payment is legitimate after days or weeks of social engineering. Device, credentials, and authentication can all look normal, so the transaction looks authorized rather than stolen-card fraud. Traditional fraud engines built for unauthorized activity therefore miss much of the scam risk at the payment step.
- How is scam prevention different from traditional fraud prevention?
- Traditional systems focus on unauthorized activity such as stolen cards or account takeover. Scam prevention increasingly means spotting authorized payments that should never have happened - a harder problem that needs upstream journey context across social platforms, banks, and PSPs, not only the final transaction risk score at checkout.
- What does “moving upstream” mean for scam defense?
- It means connecting signals across social platforms, banks, PSPs, and fraud tools before funds leave the account, and understanding the behaviour that led to the payment. Reacting only after the charge clears is too late for many social-media scams, because the victim has already been convinced the transfer is legitimate.
More buyer questions on Radar, Protect, chargebacks, and Signifyd alternatives.
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