It’s a scenario most people have encountered: you try to make a big or unexpected purchase on your credit card, and, at the moment you need it the most, the card gets declined.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as confirming the purchase via text message, and you can quickly complete the transaction. Other times, it’s a days-long process that involves confirmation codes, mailed letters and waiting on hold with the card company to validate that it was indeed you who wanted to buy the product.
The rate of fraud alerts is “absolutely” going up, according to Deloitte U.S. risk & financial advisory principal Satish Lalchand.
It can’t be ignored, because many of the alerts are not false alarms.
About 60% of credit card holders in 2023 experienced some sort of attempted fraud, according to Experian.
“Fraud in general across all channels, whether it’s check fraud, credit card fraud payments, the peer-to-peer payments, everything, is significantly increasing at a very rapid pace,” Lalchand said.
Global card losses attributed to fraud reached $33 billion in 2022, according to payments industry research company Nilson Report, with the U.S. market representing roughly 40% of losses. It has forecast a persistent threat that could reach nearly $400 billion in card fraud in the decade to 2032.
“What’s driving a lot of this type of fraud, is the fraudsters themselves are using AI in general,” Lalchand said. “So, they are able to now move much faster.”
In the past, cybercriminals could open five to ten accounts a day. Now, it’s hundreds, if not thousands of accounts, thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence.
But at the same time AI is helping to detect potentially problematic transactions, with the downside of many cases turning out to be false alarms.
“When we come down to credit cards, financial institutions are investing more in the concept of fraud and fraud modernization, replacing older technology and having better fraud detection capabilities, and retuning their alerts,” Lalchand said. “That’s also causing a lot more on the detection side to go up.”
More personal data is being stolen
Michael Bruemmer, Experian vice president and head of its global data breach resolution and consumer protection division, says a lot more fraud is being done in other ways than stealing your credit card number, using other portions of your financial background, identity background, social security number.
Just in the past five months, there have been four major data breaches including Ticketmaster, Change Healthcare, AT&T and National Public Data. More data breaches can lead to more scrutiny and more preemptive alert protocols, although they are often not the main reason for alerts, according to Experian.
There is some good news. Overall, the rate of false purchases on credit cards is actually decreasing, according to Experian. There have been 416,582 cases of credit card fraud that have been perpetrated in 2024. It’s down 5.4% versus 2023.
AI’s ability to detect patterns based on previous behavior has helped. While you may still get credit card blocks on purchases that seem out of the ordinary, technology has improved fraud alerts in other ways. MasterCard said it’s observed on average a 20% increase in its ability to detect fraud thanks to AI, and up to 300% increase in its ability to detect fraud without more false alerts. Mastercard declined to provide statistics on the absolute level of fraud and overall accuracy of fraud detection.
“We’ve come such a long way to actually reduce the friction out there,” said Johan Gerber, Mastercard executive vice president and head of security solutions.
Take for example, travel plans and making purchases in a foreign country. Before, people would have to call the credit card company. Now, card companies automatically note vacations and travel patterns based on past purchase behavior. Technology has also made it faster to identify and clear flagged fraud alerts if it is indeed a false alarm. Instead of having to call and wait on hold, in many cases verification can be done in a matter of minutes through authorized related accounts or through information only the individual cardholder would know.
Tips to cut down on unnecessary alerts
Today, some scenarios will raise concerns within current security parameters. Experian notes that while data breaches may turn up the dial on fraud alerts, it’s actually changes in shopping patterns that are guaranteed to set off red flags. If you’re buying something at a new store or purchasing a big ticket item that you don’t usually buy, that’s typically something that will be noted. MasterCard also said trying multiple transactions quickly in a row will always alert their systems. So, you can expect these will usually garner some sort of temporary block.
“It’s a balance,” Gerber said. “Do I want to be inconvenienced? Do you potentially want a transaction that [MasterCard] may get wrong because [we] declined you? Or do I want to sit on the other side of the loss of trust in that [we] actually did let a transaction through and you should have known it’s not me.”
Other things you can do to ensure that you get mostly accurate fraud alerts is to sign up for monitoring services and personally set limit alerts on your accounts. Most institutions will let you place monetary limits on when you can get notified about big transactions. Freezing your credit file, using a password manager and using two-factor authentication for your financial accounts with a biometric passcode can also be beneficial.
“Try to shop on regular, reputable shopping sites, and if you’re going to use a credit card, have a low-level limit credit card that’s only used for those shopping sites,” Bruemmer said. “I would also recommend using a tap-to-pay or a mobile app and then make sure you’re not shopping on a public Wi-Fi network.”
And, even if the alerts may be annoying, never ignore them. Even though it may seem like you get notice of a data breach every day, it doesn’t mean you won’t eventually be affected.
“Consumers should pay attention to all of this, because it’s just a matter of time … they will be impacted,” Lachland said.
Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.
About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.
Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.
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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.