Scam prevention means stopping a scam before the victim sends money. Most of what banks and credit unions do today is scam detection: spotting a suspicious payment once it has started. By then, the customer has already been persuaded. FALKIN was founded on the view that the real harm happens earlier, in the first text, call or click.

The scale of the problem

Phishing and scams are as old as the internet, but AI has turned deception into an industry. Interpol estimates financial fraud cost the world $442 billion in 2025, and that AI-powered schemes are 4.5 times more profitable than traditional ones.

The national numbers tell the same story. In the UK, criminals stole £1.28 billion through payment fraud in 2025, according to UK Finance. Authorised push payment (APP) fraud, where victims are tricked into sending the money themselves, rose 19% to £576.4 million. In the US, the FBI recorded $20.9 billion in reported internet crime losses. And that’s only what gets reported: the Consumer Federation of America 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.
   
   

The payment is the last moment to stop a scam, not the best one. The earlier help arrives, the less persuading there is to undo.

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

Sources: Interpol Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment 2026; 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.