A startup partners with a threat intelligence firm to expose mule accounts used to receive and move illicit funds — including money obtained through scams — before the intended victims actually pay up in an AI scam.
It was a typical weekday at a private bank in Asia. A customer had set up a transfer of US$60,000. This wasn’t a hacker or a bot — it was an actual human who had willingly clicked “approve” to send money from their bank account. But the payment never went through.
And that’s a good thing.
Behind the scenes and in real time, the bank checked the receiving account against a list of accounts confirmed to belong to scammers. When a match popped up, the bank was able to intervene.
According to the startup tackling a pervasive weakness in AI scam prevention: by the time a victim reports they’ve been scammed, the money is already gone and almost impossible to trace. By proactively identifying where the money is going, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Claudio Staub says he can stop the AI Scam in their tracks.
That’s because, Staub says, “Every scam involving the transfer of funds ultimately ends in a payment.”
Instead of trying to determine whether a customer is being manipulated, the startup identifies the accounts that criminals use to collect and then quickly launder money. To find them, it uses AI-generated personas that engage scammers and gather payment details — “using AI for good to combat AI Scam at scale,” a spokesman says.
The startup’s Money Mule Intelligence is now available through a threat intelligence company owned by Mastercard, helping fraud teams identify in real time the bank accounts that criminals use to move illicit funds so that financial institutions can use the intelligence to prevent the transfers.
It’s another weapon in Mastercard’s arsenal of fraud intelligence, including Consumer Fraud Risk, which gives both sending and receiving banks real-time risk insights into account-to-account payments, and Decision Intelligence Pro, which applies advanced AI and graphing algorithms to cardholders’ behavior to help issuers assess transaction risk, detect fraud and approve more genuine transactions in real time.
Follow the Money
There’s a technical term for the kind of scams the startup disrupts: authorized push payment fraud. With APP fraud, scammers don’t hack into your account. It’s more insidious: they talk you into sending the money yourself. It could be in the guise of a romance that feels dreamy, a “now-or-never” investment, or a fake job opportunity that seems written with you in mind. (Because, with AI, it might have been.)
While AI Scam tactics change and evolve, they all have one thing in common: the money has to be sent somewhere. Often, it’s a bank account, and those receiving accounts are called “money mules.” They’re an intermediary stop where the money can be withdrawn as untraceable cash or converted into crypto, with a trail that goes cold in seconds. Sometimes, the money is then relayed to another mule account, creating more distance between the victim and the scammer and making it that much more difficult to trace.