At Money20/20 in Las Vegas, where the energy was electric and the future of fintech took center stage, Mastercard spotlighted a major step forward in fraud prevention.

What you need to know: The company unveiled Mastercard Threat Intelligence — the first solution of its kind designed to combat payment fraud at scale. It combines Mastercard's fraud insights and global network visibility with cyber threat intelligence from Recorded Future (acquired by Mastercard in 2024), helping banks proactively detect and prevent cyber-enabled fraud.

Key numbers:

• $4.88 million is the average cost of a data breach globally.
• The global cost of cybercrime projected by 2029 is >$15.6 trillion.
• 80% of fraud teams respond faster to threats when collaborating with cyber teams.

The challenges Mastercard Threat Intelligence is addressing are clear: payment fraud is evolving in real time — and bad actors are operating at scale. "Cybercriminals and bad actors are infiltrating every corner of the internet," said Johan Gerber, EVP, global head of security solutions at Mastercard. "You can buy a credit card, a passport, a stolen plane or even someone's identity."

In a panel on the Exchange Stage at Money20/20, Tracy (Kitten) Goldberg, director of cybersecurity at Javelin Strategy & Research, began by noting, "Our increasing digital footprints are putting us, our families, companies, and even our national security at increasing risk," Goldberg said. "The digital individuals we were 20 years ago are quite different from who we are digitally today — but that old footprint is still out there, entangling us in an ever-growing cyber web."

What this means: Cybercrime has evolved into a full-fledged commercial enterprise — with billions of dollars flowing through it — blurring the lines between traditional hacking, financial crime and organized criminal networks. What once focused on stealing data or IP for targeted buyers has shifted to broad monetization on illegal marketplaces. [1] [LN2]

Executive vice president of Services for North America at Mastercard, Ranjita Iyer, summarized it while speaking on a Payments Shed podcast at Money 20/20: "Cybercrime is industrialized. We're no longer talking about a 'Nigerian prince' — today's attackers are running cybercrime like a business." She continued, "AI is enabling fraud at scale. Just as we're excited about the potential of AI, fraudsters are using it to generate fake websites and at a massive scale — making them harder than ever to detect and shut down."

How it's done: Criminals routinely test stolen card data with small transactions to verify it's active before using it for large-scale fraud. Mastercard's new tool doesn't just detect these test transactions — it takes action in real time, declining the stolen card before further fraud can occur and providing intelligence to the bank. At the same time, it flags the businesses used to test the cards, to stop the activity from occurring.

"What's different here," Gerber said, "is that we don't just stop the transaction — we shut down the card or token and prevent the fraud before it can occur." In a threat landscape that's growing more complex by the day, Mastercard Threat Intelligence offers banks a proactive way to intercept fraud before it spreads.

The details: "This is the first solution of its kind that integrates threat intelligence from hidden online networks like this at scale," explained Gerber. With visibility across 3.5 billion cards and 160 billion annual transactions, Mastercard's network empowers both cyber and fraud defenders to prevent attacks before damage occurs — instead of cleaning up after the fact.

• Card testing detection: Provides real-time detection and alerts for fraudulent card activity, delivers actionable insights and offers targeted intelligence to assess merchant risk and respond quickly to incidents.

• Digital skimming intelligence: Provides quantitative data to help customers assess skimmer impacts and disrupt card-related malware.
• Merchant threat intelligence: Targeted payment fraud insights and threat intelligence to assess merchant risk and make incident response faster.
• Payment ecosystem threat intelligence: Weekly reports that detail cyber threats and vulnerabilities across the payments landscape.
• Payment intelligence reports: Supplies monthly actionable case studies and fraud trend analyses to help organizations proactively strengthen their payment security strategies.

Plus, plus, plus: Mastercard's multi-layered defense integrates other AI-powered tools like Decision Intelligence Pro and the First-Party Trust program.

• Decision Intelligence Pro uses generative AI techniques to analyze transaction data using a proprietary recurrent neural network to understand the relationships between a user's characteristics and their past behaviors. By analyzing a cardholder's historical spending patterns and merchant visits, it can identify anomalies and assess the legitimacy of a transaction in milliseconds.
• The First-Party Trust program helps prevent first-party ("friendly") fraud by using transaction insights to help determine if a charge is legitimate — streamlining the dispute resolution process for merchants and making it more time and cost-efficient.

The results: Gerber indicated that in just a short amount of time, Mastercard Threat Intelligence is already quantifiably effective.

• In a six-month market test, Mastercard's ecosystem partners identified and took down 9,500 infected merchant websites linked to an estimated $120 million in fraud losses — halting the theft of payment data.

The takeaway:

Gerber sums it up well: "This product brings different types of intelligence together to empower defenders — both cyber and fraud — with the insights they need to do a better job. It enables that intelligence to be applied in real time, not after the damage is done."

As fraud and cybercrimes evolve and become faster, smarter and more industrialized, Mastercard Threat Intelligence offers a first-of-its-kind solution that uses threat intelligence to stop fraud before it starts — helping financial institutions protect consumers.

Want to learn more about proactive fraud prevention?

Discover how Mastercard Threat Intelligence can help.