Leaders In Payments · 2026-02-17 · 25 min
Fraud hasn’t disappeared - it got smarter. Organized rings now aim upstream at SaaS platforms and ISVs that embed payments, where a single gap in onboarding, transaction logic, or refund flows can be scaled into thousands of attacks overnight. We sit down with Brian Rust, SVP and Deputy Chief Information Security Officer at Worldpay, to map the real fraud journey (entry, action, exit) and the concrete moves product and security leaders can make right now to protect merchants and brand trust. We start with the why: platforms offer leverage. Brian explains how bots and AI generate convincing synthetic businesses that pass weak KYC, and what early signals still break the spell - impossible form completion times, IP and address mismatches, and brand-new domains claiming long histories. From there, we dive into the middle of the kill chain: card testing. You’ll hear how velocity spikes, elevated decline rates, and geo anomalies betray large-scale testing and how adaptive limits for new merchants can contain losses and prevent network penalties. Then we confront refund abuse, where attackers exploit trust by refunding to different instruments or flooding high-value returns.
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