Merchant Fraud in 2026: The Synthetic Merchant Economy (On-Demand Webinar)
Participants:
Evan Canavan
VP Risk Management at Priority
Joe Palombo
VP Payments Risk at Avidia Bank
What’s in the video:
This on-demand session brings together three risk practitioners to examine how merchant fraud actually operates in 2026, using real acquiring and PayFac cases rather than theory.
The video walks through:
- How fraud syndicates use AI and synthetic identities to move faster than traditional onboarding and monitoring controls.
- Why merchants that look clean at onboarding turn high-risk later, and where in the lifecycle that shift shows up.
- The mechanics behind four recurring schemes: hidden aggregators, ghost merchants, logistics clustering, and negative-option scams.
- Why leading risk teams investigate at the network level, connecting merchants, devices, and behavior, instead of reviewing each merchant in isolation.
- Which operational signals surface emerging fraud early, before losses escalate.
- What modern merchant risk programs do differently to keep pace with tactics that keep changing.
The format is four case studies, field insights from the speakers, and a live discussion on how acquiring and PayFac teams are rethinking fraud detection.
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