Essay

Why fraud models should only propose. By Amir Shachar.

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Riskernel

Prove your AI agents and models are safe

Your AI investigator writes a confident case note. Is it right?

Teams want AI agents to work fraud and AML alerts because queues are long and most alerts are nothing. But real case files make a poor test: a closed alert is not proof of innocence, and the rings you know about are the ones you already caught. Score an agent on past decisions and you mostly learn how well it copies them, blind spots included.

Built for Fraud and AML leaders piloting AI agents on alerts or case dispositions; Head of Fraud Ops, MLRO, Director of Financial Crime

The problem in numbers

What the public record shows

Every figure links to the page it came from, with its date.

2% to 4%

of alerts serious enough to escalate and file a suspicious activity report, per a 2025 benchmarking study by an industry analyst firm

sanctionscanner.com, 2026-04

15 percent

of daily work decisions Gartner expects AI agents to make on their own by 2028

theregister.com, 2025-06

130

vendors Gartner estimates are real (an "about" figure), out of thousands claiming agentic AI products

theregister.com, 2025-06

What you get

The deliverables

You get a synthetic back office (customers, transactions, alerts, KYC files, disputes) with planted fraud rings and mule networks and a hidden answer key, and a scored run of your investigator agent against it.

A synthetic back office

Customers, transactions, alerts, KYC files and disputes that behave like a real operation, with planted fraud rings and mule networks.

A hidden answer key

Every member of every planted scheme, including accounts that never raised an alert. It is never shown to the agent or whoever tunes it.

A scored run

What your agent found, what it missed, how many innocent customers it escalated, and whether its stated evidence supports its conclusion.

How it runs

Agreed on a short call, set by the agent and the case types, start to finish

Agreed on a short call, set by the agent and the case types

  1. Scope the pilot
  2. Your agent works the cases
  3. Score and readout
Step 1

Scope the pilot

We agree which alert types and schemes matter to you and how your agent takes in cases.

Step 2

Your agent works the cases

The agent runs on the synthetic back office the way it would on real alerts.

Step 3

Score and readout

Results are checked against the answer key and walked through with your fraud and AML leads.

Method

How the answer is produced

Truth known in advance

Because the schemes were planted, the right answer is known for every case, including the misses a normal pilot never sees.

Connected cases

Rings are spread across several alerts, so you see whether the agent links them or treats each alert alone.

No customer data leaves

Everything is synthetic, so the test does not need data-sharing approvals before it starts. The key covers known typologies, not every possible scheme.

Amir Shachar
Amir ShacharFounder, Riskernel

Why Amir

Designed and led by someone who has built fraud models in production

The patents closest to this problem:

Amir is a named inventor on US 12,541,721 B2 (Method for extreme class imbalance within fraud detection, filed at NICE Actimize; granted).

Fraud is a tiny share of cases, which is why rare planted schemes are needed to test an investigator, and this patent covers building models under that extreme imbalance.

View on Google Patents

Amir is a named inventor on US 2023/0267468 A1 (Unsupervised clustered explanation-based feature selection using transfer learning for low fraud scenario, filed at NICE Actimize; pending).

Amir is a named inventor on this patent application for detecting fraud when there are almost no confirmed examples, the same missing-labels problem that makes real case files a weak test.

View on Google Patents

These patents were filed at the companies named. They show the problems Amir has worked on; they are not Riskernel products.

Is this you

You probably need this if

  • You are piloting an AI agent to triage alerts or draft case dispositions.
  • A vendor is selling you an AI analyst, shown on cases of its choosing.
  • Your alert backlog is growing faster than your team.
  • You approved the pilot because the agent's write-ups read well.
  • You have no way to count the bad actors the agent cleared.

Questions

Before you reach out

Do you need our customer data?

No. The back office is synthetic, so no customer data leaves your organisation.

Can we test a vendor's agent?

Yes. Any agent that can read cases and return a disposition can be run against it, including one you are still evaluating.

Does it catch every kind of fraud?

No. The answer key reflects typologies Amir knows how to plant. It is a strong test of known patterns, not proof against every possible scheme.

Can we rerun it later?

Yes. A new version of the agent or its prompts runs on a new back office with the same scheme types planted at the same difficulty. The agent cannot have memorised the cases, and scores still compare across versions.