What’s New in Merchant Fraud, with Dajana G.

I have been wanting to have this conversation for a while.

Dajana Gajic-Fisic has 26 years in merchant fraud. She started at Macy's in 2000, calling Visa and Mastercard in multiple languages to manually verify addresses at the point of sale. She has watched e-commerce fraud detection evolve from its earliest form through chip and pin migration, the explosion of online fraud, and now the AI era. She is currently VP of Fraud Strategy at The Wolfe Companies, working in the gift card space, which if you think has no fraud, you would be wrong.

What I liked most about this conversation is that Dajana is not someone who talks about merchant fraud from the sidelines. She fights it every day, including building out merchant fraud ring detection processes from scratch and figuring out how to detect merchant fraud attacks before they ever reach a payment page. That gives her a perspective on what is actually happening right now versus what the industry tends to talk about.

We covered a lot of ground. One thing I want to flag before you dive in. This is one of those conversations where we keep coming back to basics. Not because the threat landscape is simple. But because getting the basics right is actually how you handle whatever the threat landscape throws at you next. I thought that was worth saying up front.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why e-commerce fraud trends follow predictable patterns when the environment shifts, and what the chip and pin migration of 2015 tells us about AI today
• How Dajana thinks about AI powered fraud attacks as a practitioner who is actively fighting them, not just theorizing about them
• Why first party fraud and refund abuse in ecommerce may be the number one threat for merchants right now, not AI
• How fraud as a service has made it possible to commit refund fraud without any technical knowledge, and what that means for merchant fraud teams
• Why nearly fifty years of chargeback dispute rules regulation have not kept pace with the environment merchants are actually operating in
• The cross-merchant fraud intelligence sharing story that could have prevented six months of losses at another merchant's business
• Why end to end fraud monitoring is one of the most neglected basics in merchant fraud prevention strategies
• Dajana's 360 approach to fraud operations, which separates the fraud process into four parts and maps how they feed each other
• Why merchant fraud KPIs like chargeback rate alone tell an incomplete story and what to measure alongside them
• How the lines between merchant fraud vs bank fraud are blurring at the identity and behavior layer

You should listen to this episode if you:

• Work in e-commerce fraud detection and want a practitioner's view on what is actually changing versus what is being overhyped
• Are dealing with first party fraud, friendly fraud chargebacks, or refund abuse and want to hear how someone with 26 years of merchant fraud experience thinks about it
• Have felt frustrated that merchant fraud collaboration and intelligence sharing stops at your immediate network
• Are building or restructuring your fraud team structure and want a framework that actually scales
• Lead a merchant fraud team and are trying to figure out how to get upstream of the payment rather than catching fraud at checkout
• Want to understand how merchant cyber security collaboration is evolving and what convergence actually looks like in practice on the merchant side
• Are newer to the space and want a fraud fighter career development perspective from someone who grew up inside the industry