Fraudsters Are Making a Tournament Run — Here’s How to Beat Them
For college basketball fans like me, March is special. The tournament always brings some of the best sports moments of the year, and the first weekend of games certainly didn’t disappoint in 2025. Just don’t ask me how my bracket is doing (really, McNeese?).
But while fans anxiously await the next round, fraudsters are creating madness of their own. In March, we see coordinated teams of fraudsters up their pace of play: NeuroID data shows a 44% increase in attacks in March, with fraudulent users 2x more likely to be part of a fraud ring. March attacks take fraud teams into overtime, too, lasting 40% longer than average.
Fraudsters don’t care who they’re up against — they take any win they can, be it against a mid-major startup or a blue-blood top financial institution. Here are the biggest keys for fraud teams to spoil fraudsters’ Cinderella story this March:
Key #1: Watch for Opposing Scouts
In college basketball, going to your opponent’s games and gathering intel is a no-go; it’ll result in some major penalties, including a ban from postseason tournaments. Fraudsters aren’t under the same scrutiny, though: they can test their opponents’ defenses at any time without invitation or approval, identifying weak points in their targets’ fraud stacks. We often see fraudsters launch “probes,” or small “attacks” designed not to fully infiltrate a business’s ecosystem, but rather to gather information on their fraud stack, triggers for step-ups, and ways to bypass certain checks.
With the knowledge they gain from their scouting trips, fraudsters can craft game plans for large-scale attacks that exploit the vulnerabilities they identified. These massive attacks can appear seemingly out of the blue — there are often indicators leading up to attacks, but most fraud detection tools can’t catch them.
The Winning Play: Real-Time Film Study
The biggest college basketball powerhouses are determined to keep their rivals from getting an upper hand. They’re constantly watching to make sure their game plans are kept under wraps and regularly keeping tabs on their opponents’ efforts to get ahead.
Fraud teams should have the same mindset, and they should invest in resources that support it. Solutions that provide real-time visibility into fraudster behavior and crowd-level trends are must-haves; they allow businesses to see when and how fraudsters are testing their defenses and give fraud teams a chance to adjust their strategies before a full-force attack tips off.
Key #2: Don’t Rely on a Full-Court Press
While most basketball teams save the full-court press until they’re in dire need of a turnover or quick missed shot, we’ve certainly seen some make it part of their identity — I’m specifically thinking about “Press Virginia,” the 2010s West Virginia men’s teams who flustered opponents with buzzer-to-buzzer pressure.
We see lots of businesses take this approach, implementing extensive, heavy-handed fraud checks to stop fraudsters from scoring. It’s often a losing strategy: sure, it can be an effective defensive plan, but those strenuous checks frustrate and turn away genuine customers, slowing growth and inhibiting bottom-line goals (not to mention the disasters that can happen when fraudsters find a way through the defense).
The Winning Play: In-Game Defensive Adjustments
If you run the same defense every time down the floor, fraudsters will find how to beat it sooner or later. You need to be flexible and strategic with who you pressure and who you’re happy to let shoot the ball. In other words: your fraud solutions need to be able to respond to fraudsters’ attack strategies in real-time without interfering with genuine customers.
A modern, effective fraud stack is adaptive for each user based on their level of risk. Passively assessing user risk with behavioral analytics allows you to better inform downstream checks, putting more friction in the way of fraudulent users (or outright rejecting them) while streamlining processes for genuine ones.
Key #3: Keep the Game in Hand
We see it every March: a small school playing a #1 seed close in the first half, only for the favorite to open the second half with a dominant run to take control of the game. The harsh truth is that today’s fraudsters are more akin to the top seed than the scrappy small school. They have depth that businesses don’t, with an endless bench of bots that they can bring onto the court at any moment.
If left unchecked, a large attack can turn into the business equivalent of one of these game-breaking runs. If you let an attack through and try to stop it after the fact, it’ll be next to impossible to get back in the game. The backlog of manual reviews and account closures will keep your fraud team occupied through the final buzzer (and may distract them enough to let another attack through).
The Winning Play: Top-Tier Perimeter Defense
These dominant runs often start with easy shots — defensive breakdowns that give the other team clear paths to the basket for wide open layups or easy dunks. It may seem backwards for people who haven’t spent much time on a basketball court, but stopping these close-range shots starts at the three-point line. You have to prevent your opponent from driving to the rim and stop them from passing the ball closer to the basket.
To keep fraudsters in check, fraud teams need effective, top-of-funnel detection and decisioning that can stop fraudsters before they have a chance to score. By spotting and declining fraudsters as soon as they try to create an account, log in to one, or complete a transaction, you can stop attacks in real-time without relying on manual reviews.
Behavioral Analytics: Your Fraud Detection MVP
The teams that make it the furthest in March are balanced: they make life tough for their opponents on defense, but don’t sacrifice their offensive output in doing so.
Businesses need a similar mix of security and efficiency to survive today’s fraud landscape without turning away customers. By passively assessing user risk and informing decisioning in real time, behavioral analytics can stop fraudsters’ evolving attack strategies without fouling genuine customers.
Find out how behavioral analytics can up your fraud defense game plan: request a live demo to see behavioral analytics in action.