The Money Mule Solution: What Every Scam Has in Common

This report examines the rising scale and sophistication of scams—particularly authorized push payment (APP) fraud—highlighting how AI and deepfakes improve social engineering and how criminals rely on money mule bank accounts to cash out. CYBERA’s mule intelligence found thousands of confirmed mule accounts across dozens of countries and long-lived accounts that evade traditional transaction-based detection; the report argues for intelligence-first defenses that identify mule accounts (verified via direct engagement with scammers) before payments are sent to reduce fraud losses.