Mastercard to Launch Software to Identify Crypto Fraud

UTC by Sanaa Sharma · 3 min read
Mastercard to Launch Software to Identify Crypto Fraud
Photo: Depositphotos

The company wants to extend the same kind of security and trust to the virtual asset space as in the digital commerce transaction industry.

Mastercard is ready to launch a new tool called Crypto Secure that will enable banks to recognize fraud activities related to crypto exchanges on its payment Network.

According to the report, Crypto Secure was built by CipherTrace, a blockchain-related security startup taken over by Mastercard in 2021. This will utilize an AI algorithm to examine crypto-fraud and illicit behavior from an open record of crypto transactions.

According to Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard’s president of the cyber and intelligence business, the company wants to extend the same kind of security and trust to the virtual asset space as in the digital commerce transaction industry.

The newly launched software will allow banks to not only identify but also cancel transactions from vulnerable crypto exchanges. CipherTrace, which was a startup based in Menlo Park, California before being acquired by Mastercard, allows enterprises and government bodies to examine the illegal transfer of money that involves cryptocurrencies. Its primary competitors in the industry are New York’s Chainalysis and Elliptic, from London.

Mastercard is introducing the service as criminal activities are rising in the budding stage of the virtual asset industry. Around 14 billion USD has been transferred illegally across wallets, and what adds fuel to the fire is the fact that 2022 has been at the receiving end of all massive and high-profile heists to target crypto investors.

On Mastercard’s crypto secure platform, authorities are presented with a dashboard with ratings signifying the risk of illicit activity. While Mastercard already leverages a similar technology to protect itself from fraud in currency exchanges, this will now be extended to use in transactions with Bitcoin and other virtual assets.

The maturation of this new software has made it facile for authorities to track crypto offenders and employ intelligent data science and machine learning algorithms to assess and identify the exceptions in the data on public blockchains. Mastercard is also competing with its competitor Visa, which has made significant investments of its own in the crypto industry. In its initial fiscal year of 2022, Visa had claimed to enable $2.5 billion in money transfers from cards associated with an account on a crypto exchange. A year before, Visa introduced its crypto advisory procedure to provide suggestions to customers on topics such as rolling out crypto features to analyzing NFTs.

Mastercard has denied revealing its total dollar estimate of fiat-to-crypto volumes from its networks of over two thousand crypto exchanges.

Meanwhile, governments around the globe are seeking new regulations to impose restrictions on the crypto industry, which was not very prevalent until now. Recently, the Biden administration revealed its first policy framework on crypto trade regulation in the United States.

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