SAN JOSE, Calif. -

FICO recently made moves to enhance its solution aimed at curtailing a growing fraud trend that’s caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as well as authorities in the United Kingdom.

FICO announced the latest release of the FICO Falcon Fraud Manager model for retail banking, which leverages machine learning to enhance scam detection in tandem with Falcon Fraud Manager’s existing third-party fraud detection score.

According to a news release, it’s all geared to provide banks with improved detection and prevention of authorized push payment (APP) scams.

FICO highlighted the new Scam Detection Score leverages targeted profiling of customer behavior to help FICO Falcon Fraud Manager clients detect 50% more scam transactions.

Powered by more than 120 patents in fraud-specific machine learning and AI, the FICO Falcon Platform can help financial institutions detect and prevent fraud seamlessly, in real-time. More than 2.6 billion payment accounts worldwide are protected by Falcon.

FICO explained APP scams manipulate customers into sending money to an account controlled by scammers. They can take multiple forms, including mobile game payments, online purchases that never arrive, or text messages from someone the victim mistakenly believes is a friend, business partner or bank official.

According to the FTC, more than 350,000 Americans reported losing a total of more than $245 million to fraudulent online purchases in 2020, including a record high to scams that started on social media.

In the U.K., FICO mentioned that UK Finance reported a 5% increase in losses to such fraud in 2020 with reported losses of £479 million.

FICO emphasized these scams have proved particularly difficult to detect as the person initiating the payment is the legitimate account holder — who has been tricked into making the payment.

FICO noted that the new Scam Detection Score can help Falcon customers overcome the challenge of detecting APP scams, using the distinguishing characteristics revealed by the FICO Falcon Fraud Manager model for retail banking to identify 24 times the number of fraudulent transactions on favorite devices.

“The proliferation of mobile payment apps and new open banking standards in the wake of the pandemic have caused authorized push payment (APP) scams to grow,” FICO chief analytics officer Scott Zoldi said in the news release.

“FICO has been following how the sophistication of scams are evolving at breakneck speed and we are strategically innovating to offer our clients in retail banking the cutting-edge scam detection analytics needed to combat today’s criminals,” Zoldi added.