Good morning. Now that the holidays are nearly done and your shopping largely out of the way, be sure to check your upcoming credit card statements for purchases you don’t recognize. The reason: Scammers are using artificial intelligence to increase their fraud efforts and make them more effective.
Credit card companies have reported huge upticks in fraud attempts, according to the Wall Street Journal. Visa said it blocked twice as many fraudulent charges on its credit card network in the days after Thanksgiving versus a year ago, for example, while Mastercard said it blocked nine times as many.
The good news for consumers is that while AI may help criminals, it also helps credit card companies detect fraud. But the war is far from over.
Also, Fortune is hosting its annual Brainstorm dinner on January 6 in Las Vegas, in prelude to the CES trade show. We have a fabulous lineup of speakers including Mark Cuban, entrepreneur and cofounder of Cost Plus Drugs; Teddy Bekele, chief technology officer at Land O'Lakes; Sagar Mehta, chief technology officer at OpenTable; and Lauri Palmieri, senior vice president of solution engineering at Salesforce. If you'd like to attend, please apply. —Verne Kopytoff
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