February 3, 2026
AI has the capacity to transform online retail in remarkable ways. At Equal Experts, we’ve been involved in helping clients build smarter supply chains, streamline customer experience and grow revenue through personalised recommendations to customers. But as retailers accelerate their digital and AI capabilities, so do fraudsters.
The uncomfortable truth is that AI doesn’t discriminate between good and bad intent. The same technologies that power faster insights and seamless experiences are now being weaponised to exploit them. Automated fraud is now a full-scale industry.
So what can you do about it? The good news is that retailers have more power than ever to respond to the acceleration in fraud – using exactly the same tools and data criminals use – to build more adaptive, intelligence-driven defences. The key to prevention in this new fraud landscape is shifting our approach to anticipating attacks as well as reacting to them.
To put the fear into context, global online payment fraud losses are forecast to exceed $343 billion by 2027, while fraudulent returns alone already cost retailers around $50 billion a year. And every $100 in fraudulent orders can ultimately cost double once shipping, restocking, and customer support are included. These aren’t just operational headaches; they’re signals that the systems built for yesterday’s fraud defences simply weren’t designed for the AI era. It’s time for a smarter approach.
Generative AI has fundamentally reshaped the fraud landscape. Fraudsters now use deepfakes, synthetic identities, and “bots-as-a-service” to infiltrate retail systems and exploit weaknesses at scale. The same large language models that retailers use to enhance customer experiences are being repurposed by criminals to automate account takeovers, scrape sensitive data, and craft realistic communications designed to manipulate internal teams or trigger fraudulent transactions.
At the same time, “Fraud-as-a-Service” has lowered the barrier to entry. Anyone can now buy pre-built fraud tools, complete with tutorials and support. This new reality isn’t just a threat; it’s a call to evolve. The same AI capabilities that make fraud smarter can make defence smarter too. AI is capable of spotting subtle anomalies in transaction behaviour, detecting signals across millions of interactions, and learning patterns that humans alone can’t see. The key is in how retailers harness these capabilities, and how well they connect the data that underpins them.
The shift to real-time payments, open APIs, and embedded financial products has created a highly connected ecosystem. Every partnership, every integration and every data flow brings enormous opportunity for business growth, but also new potential entry points for fraud.
Traditional rule-based systems were never built for this complexity. As fraud evolves faster than policies or models can be updated, teams find themselves constantly chasing new attack patterns rather than staying ahead of them.
Fraud prevention has long been a balancing act: tighten controls, and risk frustrating legitimate customers; relax them, and open the door to potential losses. That tension hasn’t gone away, but AI can help ease it.
With intelligent, data-driven systems, retailers can design defences that adapt dynamically to risk. Instead of one-size-fits-all rules, AI models can adjust in real time, applying stronger verification only where needed, and preserving a seamless journey for genuine customers.
As one retail leader put it:
“We’re learning to tell the difference between a risky transaction and a risky customer. That’s the key to protecting the business without punishing the majority who play fair.”
The reality is that AI is now a permanent fixture in both sides of the fraud equation. But learning how to embrace adaptive, intelligence-driven strategies can turn AI into a force for resilience, not risk.
I believe our work sits at that intersection: helping retailers use data, AI, and engineering to build systems that don’t just react to fraud, but predict and prevent it.
This is just the beginning of the conversation. In the next part of this series, we’ll explore further how retailers can move from static defences to predictive intelligence, transforming fraud prevention from a reactive cost into a proactive capability.
Read our eBook on the new fraud landscape to explore how data, technology, and strategic engineering can help you build resilience in an AI-accelerated world.
Or, if you’d like to discuss your organisation’s specific fraud prevention challenges, get in touch – we’d be happy to explore how Equal Experts can help you stay one step ahead.
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