Digital fraud is as old as the internet itself, and bad actors continuously develop new techniques while refining old ones. Fraudsters can deploy old-fashioned confidence schemes on a far greater scale than they can in person, with fraudsters leveraging social engineering and phishing schemes to convince victims to give up information of their own accord. Other bad actors wield high-tech methods such as botnets, brute force attacks and credential stuffing, automating these tactics via artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to conduct thousands of attacks every hour. Nearly half of all organizations reported being targeted by fraud this year, stemming from a wide variety of sources. Almost 70% reported attacks from external sources, with some of the most common being hackers and organized crime rings.

Payments solutions provider Vesta today announced that it raised $125 million in capital, bringing its total raised to over $145 million. The company says it will use the financing to grow and accelerate the deployment of its fraud protection and ecommerce payment products. Payment fraud is pervasive -- in 2018, $24.26 billion was lost due to credit card fraud worldwide, reports Shift Processing. That same year, the rate of card fraud increased by nearly 20% as the U.S. took the lead in reported losses. Vesta says its AI-powered decisioning platform helps clients to assess the risk of this fraud and ultimately to prevent fraud from occurring, with connectors that tie into existing software from vendors including Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and SAP Commerce Cloud.