Fraudology Podcast with Karisse Hendrick

Welcome back to Fraudology.
In this episode, I’m sitting down with Mark Porteous, a longtime leader in e-commerce fraud and trust who knows two-sided marketplaces from the inside out. Mark spent nine years at StockX, where he started in customer support before building the company’s fraud program from the ground up. And honestly, that is one of the best ways to learn marketplace fraud prevention because you see the customer complaints, the chargebacks, the seller issues, the account problems, and the policy gaps before anybody has officially decided they belong to a fraud team.
We get into what makes online marketplace fraud so different from traditional e-commerce. In a standard retail transaction, the merchant controls the inventory, the pricing, and fulfillment. In a two-sided marketplace, the platform may be trusting one person to sell, another person to buy, and sometimes a third person to deliver the product. Every additional participant creates another identity question, another fraud vector, and another opportunity for marketplace scams or policy abuse.
The deeper theme of this episode is market volatility fraud. Prices can change dramatically because of a sports result, a viral release, an artist announcement, a celebrity event, or a sudden shortage. When that happens, legitimate customer behavior changes, but fraudulent behavior changes too. Sellers may decide not to fulfill because they can resell the item for more. Buyers may file friendly fraud chargebacks after prices fall. Stolen cards may be used to purchase high-demand inventory. And risk models that normally work well can suddenly start treating good customers like fraudsters.
Marketplace fraud prevention cannot stay on autopilot. Fraud leaders need strong policies, clear escalation playbooks, reliable fraud intelligence, and real collaboration with vendors, data teams, customer support, marketing, product, and leadership.

What you’ll hear in this episode:
How Mark moved from customer support into building a marketplace fraud program from the ground up.
Why two-sided and multi-sided marketplaces create more complex identity, payment, seller, and fulfillment risks.
How marketplace pricing volatility can trigger seller non-fulfillment, policy abuse, first-party fraud, and chargebacks.
Why World Cup ticket pricing is a real-time example of market volatility fraud.
How friendly fraud can increase when buyers repurchase the same item after its secondary-market price drops.
Why fraud models and vendor strategies cannot be left on autopilot during high-demand events.
How approval rates, false declines, fraud risk scoring, and card-not-present fraud need to be balanced during sudden demand spikes.
Why fraud leaders need playbooks, policy enforcement, and clear escalation paths before an unexpected event happens.
How to work with marketing, product, growth, finance, customer support, and security without becoming the team that says no to everything.
Why strong fraud storytelling must always be supported by fraud analytics and measurable business impact.

You should listen to this episode if you:
Work in marketplace fraud prevention, trust and safety, fraud operations, or fraud risk management.
Manage buyer fraud, seller fraud, marketplace chargebacks, seller verification, or payment fraud prevention.
Work for a ticketing, sneaker, collectible, resale, delivery, or multi-sided marketplace.
Need a better approach to fraud monitoring during major events, product releases, shortages, or pricing spikes.
Want to improve collaboration between fraud, customer support, product, growth, marketing, finance, and security teams.

In this episode of Fraudology, Karisse Hendrick provides a comprehensive debrief following the massive shifts in the world of artificial intelligence and digital fraud. Karisse shares her highlights and lowlights from navigating the industry's rapid evolution, cutting through the future-looking hype to provide practical insights for fraud and payments professionals.
The conversation explores the evolving mechanics of Agentic AI in commerce, detailing how partnerships like the new Visa and OpenAI infrastructure are designed to make AI commerce a reality. Karisse provides an inside look at why OpenAI previously shelved its original agentic project to avoid becoming a merchant of record, shifting away from full structural ownership due to complex liability rules and low initial adoption.
We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the fraud landscape today:
The VAMP Threshold "Cliff": How Visa’s monitoring programs offer no "trial" or "safety" months anymore, immediately penalizing merchants the first month they cross thresholds with instant fines and fees per chargeback and TC40.
The Complexity of Agentic Chargebacks: Real-world examples of "authorized" AI purchases where merchants are automatically losing disputes because card brands do not yet have established "compelling evidence" rules or representment provisions for AI agents.
The Hook of Cloned Sites: Why AI models looking purely for the "best deal" are inadvertently leading consumers straight into elaborate, cloned phishing websites that harvest credit card data and trigger fraudulent descriptors.

Additionally, Karisse dives into the latest real-world data from a recent UK case study highlighting how fraudulent duplicate sites for household brands appeared directly inside ChatGPT's search indexes. We break down the immediate operational steps fraud leaders must take to protect their customer service channels and coordinate with IT to combat malicious DNS activity before these automated losses skyrocket.

In this episode of Fraudology, Karisse Hendrick sits down with Hailey Windham, Community Lead for Banking at Sardine and host of the Fraud Forward podcast. Hailey shares her journey transitioning from a practitioner at community financial institutions to the vendor side, focusing entirely on providing practical, operational insights for credit unions and community bank fraud teams.
The conversation explores the highly anticipated June 2026 updated guidance from FinCEN regarding Section 314B of the USA Patriot Act. Hailey breaks down how this new fact sheet eliminates long-standing confusion and regulatory fears, giving financial institutions a robust legal framework to safely share information and collaborate under a liability safe harbor.
We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the banking fraud landscape today:
Fraud Explicitly in Scope: How the new guidance expands past narrow money laundering limits to formally include computer fraud and scams targeting individuals, organizations, or governments.
Reasonable Suspicion vs. Certainty: Why teams no longer need a fully completed investigation or total certainty before sharing data, making early sharing on incomplete information permissible.
Real-Time Data Transmission: The protocol shifts allowing financial institutions to share verbal alerts, video surveillance footage, IP addresses, and attempted transactions in real time.
The Power of Associations: How non-bank compliance providers and industry trade groups can now legally organize 314B associations so smaller institutions don't have to fight fraud alone.

Additionally, Hailey dives into the preliminary insights from the industry’s first practitioner-built benchmarking survey for community banks and credit unions under $10 billion. We examine the systemic issues keeping banking fraud fighters up at night, from rigid legacy core system limitations to the immense pressures of tackling an exponential surge in social engineering scams with limited resources.

Connect with Hailey Windham

In this episode of Fraudology, Karisse Hendrick provides a comprehensive debrief following the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) Vegas conference. Karisse shares her highlights and lowlights from one of the industry's biggest events, cutting through the conference hype to provide practical insights for fraud and payments professionals.
The conversation explores the evolving mechanics of Agentic AI in commerce, detailing how tools like Sardine are now identifying AI agents by monitoring "invisible" behaviors, such as fields being filled without mouse movement. Karisse provides an inside look at why OpenAI recently shelved its "instant checkout" feature, moving away from being a merchant of record to avoid the liability of chargebacks and complex transaction enablement.
We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the fraud landscape today:
The VAMP Threshold "Cliff": How Visa is drastically reducing high-risk merchant ratios from 220 basis points to 150 basis points this April, potentially catching many enterprise merchants off guard.
The Complexity of Agentic Chargebacks: Real-world examples of "authorized" AI purchases where merchants are losing disputes because card brands like Visa do not yet have established "compelling evidence" protocols for AI agents.
The Human Element vs. AI: Why senior fraud leadership cannot be replaced by LLMs, as the critical "domain expertise" required to manage sophisticated fraud is not found in open-source data.

Additionally, Karisse dives into the latest FTC fraud statistics, revealing a staggering 430% increase in fraud since 2020. We break down the $375 million jury verdict against Meta in New Mexico, a historic win for child safety that challenges the long-standing "Section 230" liability shield. Finally, we examine a Reuters study uncovering how Meta's ability to block scam ads depends almost entirely on the financial liability they face in specific countries.

In this episode of Fraudology, Karisse Hendrick provides a comprehensive debrief following her long-awaited conversation with Kathy Stokes, the Senior Director of Fraud Prevention for AARP. Kathy shares her highlights and lowlights from leading the Fraud Watch Network, cutting through the general consumer education hype to provide practical insights for fraud and payments professionals.
The conversation explores the evolving mechanics of fraud victimization in commerce, detailing how organizations like AARP are now identifying systemic vulnerabilities by monitoring "invisible" behaviors, such as how society naturally blames the victims of these crimes. Kathy provides an inside look at why the industry must move away from simply playing "whack-a-mole" at the point of transaction, moving toward shared intelligence to avoid the massive financial and emotional liabilities of sophisticated networks.
We also explore the "hot topics" dominating the fraud landscape today:
The Private-Public Intelligence Threshold: How the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center (NEFCC/NEFSI) is bringing enterprise giants like Amazon, Google, and Walmart together with law enforcement to drastically turn isolated smaller incidents into massive, prosecutable organized crime cases.
The Complexity of Systemic Collaboration: Real-world examples of how major financial institutions are shifting their legal stances from hiding data due to perceived risk, to realizing that there is a far greater risk if they do not share fraud data across networks.
The Human Element vs. The Script: Why senior fraud leadership and empathetic human support systems cannot be replaced by generic checklists, as the critical domain expertise and emotional recovery required to turn victims into survivors is found only through dedicated peer communities.

Additionally, Kathy dives into the latest AARP initiatives, revealing the staggering reality of a $200 billion a year crime loss that impacts countless demographics across the United States. We break down the production behind AARP's Fraud Wars YouTube series, a historic project designed to humanize the impact of fraud and challenge the long-standing apathy within enterprise spaces. Finally, we examine how an organization's willingness to block scams depends almost entirely on shifting corporate mindsets away from accepting multi-million dollar losses as just an "acceptable level of risk."