Scam prevention means stopping a scam before the victim sends money. Most of what banks and credit unions do today is scam detection, which means spotting a suspicious payment once it has been started. FALKIN was founded on the view that most of the harm happens in the gap between the two.

The scale of the problem

Phishing and scams are as old as the internet, but AI is industrialising deception, and people now receive threats through every channel they use.

In the UK, criminals stole £1.28 billion through payment fraud in 2025, according to UK Finance. Authorised push payment (APP) fraud, where the victim is tricked into sending the money themselves, rose 19% to £576.4 million. In the US, the FBI recorded $20.9 billion in reported losses to internet-enabled crime in 2025. Scams are heavily under-reported, and the Consumer Federation of America, working from the FBI's data, estimates the true US figure is at least $119 billion a year.

Every scam involves impersonation

The scammer poses as a bank, a telecoms provider, a government agency, an investment firm or a retailer in an advert. In the US, imposter scams were the most reported fraud category in 2025, with more than one million reports to the FTC and nearly $3.5 billion in reported losses. In the UK, investment scams, where criminals often pose as legitimate firms, were the largest APP fraud category at £221.5 million.

Wherever there is contact between people there are scams, and this is getting worse as AI makes it cheap for a machine to pass as a human.

Detection is not prevention

A typical scam runs in five steps:

1. First contact: a text, call, email, advert or social media message.

2. Trust: the scammer builds credibility, over minutes or over weeks.

3. Instruction: the victim is told to pay, invest or move money to a "safe account".

4. Payment: the victim sends the money.

5. Discovery: the victim realises what has happened.

Fraud systems have historically focused on step four. They look for a suspicious payment and intervene with a warning or a hold. By then the customer has already been persuaded, and has often been coached to ignore the warning.

People need help at steps one to three: when they land on a new website, reply to an email or text, or answer the phone. Security tools for those moments have mostly been built for professionals, and to an everyday person they are intimidating or clunky.

Three principles for preventing scams earlier

1. Build for real human behaviour.
   People don't get scammed because they are careless. They get scammed because urgency, trust and uncertainty are part of everyday life. Safety tools should support better decisions without blame and without adding friction.
   
   

2. Put protection where customers already are.
   Safety works best inside the tools and channels people already trust, such as their banking app, and not as a separate destination. Embedding protection in existing digital journeys helps customers and members act safely without changing their habits.
   
   

3. Share signals.
   No single person sees every threat. Scams evolve quickly and spread unevenly across channels and communities. By learning from shared signals and real customer reports, financial institutions can spot patterns earlier and respond before isolated incidents become widespread harm. It works like a neighbourhood watch for scams.
   
   

FALKIN builds scam prevention tools for financial institutions in the US, UK and EU. Its mission is to stop scams before money moves.

Sources: UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026; FBI Internet Crime Report 2025; FTC imposter scam data for 2025; Consumer Federation of America estimate of US scam losses.