Your Bank Might Know You’re Being Scammed Before You Do
Sharell Barshishat and Erin West dive deep into the fascinating —and alarming — intersection of fraud, banking, and technology.
Episode 49: Scams don’t just hurt individual victims — they fund multinational crime, strain bank call centers, and flow directly into money laundering networks. In this episode, Sharell Barshishat of BioCatch breaks down how technology is changing the fraud-fighting playbook. From spotting bots at account opening to detecting a fraud victim’s hesitation mid-transfer, Sharell explains how technology can read what people do to identify fraud in real time.
Sharell and Erin also discuss why stopping scams requires a unified approach across sectors, from banks to social media to government. From Telegram discussions to behavioral biometrics, the stakes have never been higher.
Five Key Points about Banks, Tech, and Fraud
AI is accelerating the fraud threat landscape — fast. AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to committing sophisticated fraud. A single person with the right tools can now do what once took a criminal organization months to accomplish. Telegram and mainstream social media platforms are openly used to recruit fraudsters, sell stolen credentials, and share techniques — with little apparent fear of consequence.
From a technology perspective alone, the toolkit available to fraudsters now puts them in overdrive. —Sharell Barshishat, BioCatch
Behavior never lies, even when people do. Behavioral biometrics captures how you interact with your device — your typing cadence, hesitations, swipe patterns, and pauses. In scam scenarios, this can reveal that someone is being coached in real time, screen-shared, or acting under duress, even when every other signal says the transaction is legitimate.
Fraud travels on a highway of mule accounts. Every scam, every business email compromise, every pig butchering investment ultimately lands in a mule account. Identifying these accounts early — before stolen funds arrive — is one of the highest-leverage interventions available to banks, and behavioral signals can flag accounts being used as assets rather than as genuine banking tools.
The problem itself doesn’t always live with just the victim. It is actually quite a large business problem for banks.—Sharell Barshishat, BioCatch
Australian banks show what’s possible with political will. Australian banks have implemented dynamic friction to disrupt scams. They use tailored questionnaires, payment delays triggered by scam-risk signals, and trained specialist teams to break the psychological hold scammers build over weeks or months. The key ingredient in developing this approach wasn’t just technology; it was regulatory direction that gives banks permission and obligation to act.
Scams are a banking problem, not just a victim problem. A single scam call can take 10 times longer to service than a normal customer interaction. Banks that frame fraud purely as victim negligence are missing a significant operational cost — and a legal exposure. Knowingly processing funds that flow into money-laundering accounts is not a neutral act.
There has to be a genuine forward-thinking way of this as a major international crisis. We have an obligation to be disruptive to that. —Sharell Barshishat, BioCatch
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Who Is Sharell Barshishat?
Sharell Barshishat has spent close to a decade working in fraud prevention and financial crime. He started his ACI Worldwide as a Risk Analyst on the RED team, where he focused on fraud prevention in the merchant space. He learned very quickly that fraud never slows down, nor do the people trying to stop it.
He has become deeply involved in how behavioral analytics and data are applied in the real world. Today, Sharell is Director of Global Advisory for North America at BioCatch. He focuses on strategic use of the company’s technology and helping drive new products, technologies, and solutions forward. He considers himself a “certified data geek” who genuinely enjoys turning complex fraud challenges into practical strategies that work.
Episode Chapters
00:00 Introduction
04:12 The Evolution of Fraud and Technology’s Role
07:02 Understanding Behavioral Biometrics
09:45 The Impact of AI on Fraud
12:26 Practical Applications of Behavioral Biometrics
15:04 Risk Assessment in Fraud Detection
20:18 Understanding Human Behavior in Fraud Detection
21:10 The Role of Mule Accounts in Fraud
23:32 Identifying and Preventing Pig Butchering Scams
27:35 Breaking the Spell: Human Interaction in Scam Prevention
30:06 Importance of Community in Combating Scams
34:26 Government Role in Addressing Fraud
37:36 Collaborative Solutions for Financial Institutions
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Sponsors of Stolen
BioCatch prevents financial crime by recognizing patterns in human behavior, continuously collecting 3,000 anonymized data points – keystroke and mouse activity, touch screen behavior, physical device attributes, and more – as people interact with their digital banking platforms. With these inputs, BioCatch's models reveal patterns that distinguish the criminal from the legitimate.
Scamnetic is a leader in AI-powered scam detection and prevention, protecting individuals, businesses, and financial institutions from digital scams. With solutions like KnowScam and IDeveryone, Scamnetic delivers real-time scam insights, identity verification, and intervention. Restoring trust, reducing losses, and empowering organizations to safeguard customers in an increasingly complex digital world.
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