Fraud prevention is a cross-functional effort. Fraud fighting teams are at their strongest when they’re aligned across the business, from C-suite to operations, making, and customer support.
Ultimately, everyone in your organization has the same goal: the well-being and growth of your platform. But, each team measures success differently. This is where tension creeps in, and where fraud teams can struggle to get buy-in.
Preventing fraud is a team effort—not just within your own team, but within the whole company.
Want to get more teams on board? Here’s how to open the conversation, build alignment, and make fraud prevention a shared priority across your company.
Fraud doesn’t live neatly inside one department. Repeat offenders move across devices, accounts, and touchpoints, and the signals that expose them often show up in different places across the organization.
When teams anchor on shared identity metrics—like user lifetime value, repeat behavior, eligibility, and trust—fraud conversations stop being abstract. They become practical. Everyone can see how fraud prevention supports growth instead of fighting it.
One of the most important things to remember when talking to executives is that they aren’t fraud experts...and they don’t need to be.
After all, that’s why they hired you.
What they do care about is business impact.
That means leaving fraud jargon behind and speaking the language of return on investment. Instead of leading with volumes or technical metrics, translate fraud into dollars lost, growth constrained, or revenue protected.
If you just come to your CEO and you say, ‘Hey, there were 2 million fake accounts last year,’ that sounds big, but what does it mean? If you're able to say, ‘These fake accounts, all of them, they used a $10 coupon.’ That means you just gave $10 to a bunch of fraudsters, right?
So if you're able to do that math—and you should always do it—you can come to your CEO and you say, ‘Hey, we burned $20 million of coupons.’ That's a different story.
Exactly the same scenario, but you just brought this up in a much better way, so people can understand the real impact.
– André Ferraz, Incognia CEO and Co-Founder
Executives are moving fast and making high-stakes decisions all day long. The clearer and more concrete you can be, the more likely your message is to land. Don’t just describe the fraud problem, show what it’s costing the business and what fixing it unlocks.
We often talk about about how and why fraud prevention and marketing should collaborate more, especially for marketplace and gig economy platforms. That’s because the marketing promotions common in these industries are especially vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
Using promo abuse as an example. From a marketing perspective, controls like limiting discounts, increasing onboarding friction, or restricting certain user segments can feel like growth killers. But that’s only true if you assume every new user is equally valuable.
In reality, fraud can skew growth metrics.
Faisal Ahmad Jafri, formerly Head of Operations at Glovo, explains his strategy for making a stronger fraud prevention case to marketing teams:
I have always worked with growth teams very closely, and how I have tackled this problem is by showing them the life cycle or the lifetime value of a customer.
If you are in a customer growth spree, but there are specific cohorts of new customers that have a very poor customer lifetime value, I think that is the way you can convince the growth team that this is a cohort of customers that is not adding any value to the business, but rather they are draining your P&L.
Brian Hiebert, Senior Fraud Operations Manager at Just Eat Takeaway, agreed, emphasizing that marketing and fraud prevention ultimately want the same things:
You know, the last thing that your marketing team wants to see is that you're throwing this money at new customers and promotions are being utilized, but then none of those customers come back, which indicates that it's just a fake account created just to utilize the new customer voucher.
When fraud teams help marketing understand which users convert, return, and create value—and which ones don’t—fraud prevention stops looking like friction. It becomes a way to protect campaign performance and stretch acquisition budgets further.
Customer support teams are usually the first to feel refund abuse. They’re the ones talking directly to users trying to get money back, credits issued, or policies bent.
That makes alignment especially important.
Fraud teams tend to think in terms of classification and risk. Support teams think in terms of fairness and customer experience. Mixing those lenses can create tension, particularly if every denied refund starts to feel like accusing someone of fraud.
Faisal explains:
As risk professionals, we are just trying to classify who is eligible for a refund and who is not eligible for a refund. But the customer service reps would start to think that, ‘Okay, this person is a fraudster and this person is a genuine or an original customer.’
So I really had to work with the customer support reps to make them understand that you are not supposed to say, let's say, ‘Faisal is fraud,’ or ‘Brian is fraud.’ You will only say that this person is not eligible for a refund and this person is eligible for a refund. Fraud in the customer base, let's say there would be about 5 percent of the customer base, maybe 10 percent of the customer base, but your business is really growing because of genuine customers.
And if you start to look at every customer with the lens of fraud, then your business can't grow. Then you won't think for the betterment of the customers.
Having an open line to customer service is also important so that they feel comfortable contacting fraud prevention about anything new or strange they’re seeing on their side.
Customer service can be an excellent source of intelligence on new fraudster tactics:
It's important to maintain a line of communication with the customer support teams so that you can understand if anything is changing in terms of people calling your contact center and complaining about X, Y, and Z.
You should have a relationship with that team because usually that's where you start understanding what could be changing… Once you have a few anecdotal examples, then try to engage the data science team, for example, and do a deep dive to try to understand how big a problem is.
– André Ferraz, CEO and Co-Founder, Incognia
When we break down communication barriers between different teams, we get closer in alignment on the best way to prevent fraud and promote growth at the same time.
Fraudsters collaborate. They share tools, tactics, and intel.
If teams in your organization don't do the same, that's an advantage you're handing over.
When fraud prevention is framed through shared metrics—like revenue impact, user value, eligibility, and trust—it stops feeling like a blocker and starts looking like infrastructure. Infrastructure that enables growth instead of slowing it down.
With a shared view of identity and impact, fraud prevention moves from reactive to strategic, protecting revenue, reducing friction for real users, and making the entire platform harder to game.