AI Financial Defense by LifeLock

According to the latest FTC data, consumers reported losing over $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25% increase compared to the previous year. If you catch fraudulent charges or transfers, you may be able to reverse them. But the signs may be hard to notice on your bank and credit card statements.

Fraudulent transactions can easily blend in among day-to-day payments, monthly subscriptions, and transfers to friends or family. And the more accounts you have, the more difficult it is to stay on top of them all.

AI Financial Defense, available on all LifeLock plans, is designed to make it simpler to monitor multiple bank accounts and credit cards, helping you detect potentially fraudulent activity by monitoring trends in your purchases, withdrawals, and transfers.

How AI Financial Defense works

AI Financial Defense monitors activity across all your connected financial accounts, looking for unusual payments, unfamiliar merchants, or spending activity that doesn’t fit your normal patterns. If it detects anything unusual that might signal fraud, the tool flags the activity on a financial monitoring dashboard so you can review it .

Here’s how AI Financial Defense works, step by step:

1. It uses AI to analyze your spending habits, reviewing all of your connected accounts to build a baseline of your normal financial behavior, like how much you spend, transfer to other accounts, or withdraw each month.
2. It compares new spending activity against your baseline, detecting suspicious changes like a major increase in withdrawals or new automatic payments.
3. It provides insights into unusual charges, like telling you when the transactions occurred and providing full merchant names, so you can investigate them fully and determine if they're fraudulent.
4. It helps you navigate the next steps, with a natural chat interface to guide you through how to dispute a fraudulent transaction or freeze a compromised card.

Instead of reviewing transactions one at a time, AI Financial Defense recognizes the context surrounding each charge. That means a cluster of transactions made close to each other while traveling is less likely to be flagged than a single charge that doesn’t fit your usual behavior.

AI Financial Defense also helps make transactions easier to understand, translating abbreviated merchant references like “SKS” into real merchant names like “Saks Fifth Avenue.” That helps you avoid the confusing process of trying to figure out whether transactions on your statements are legitimate.

What happens when something looks suspicious?

When AI Financial Defense detects a suspicious trend in purchases, transfers, or withdrawals, it flags the activity on your LifeLock financial monitoring dashboard. The alert will explain why the activity was flagged and provide additional details like how many transfers were detected or where a payment was made, so you can determine if it’s fraudulent.

If you don’t recognize the transaction, AI Financial Defense will guide your next steps. Depending on the situation, help might include:

• Verifying the charge with your bank.
• Disputing or reversing the transaction.
• Monitoring your account more closely.
• Canceling and replacing your card.

And, since you can talk to AI Financial Defense using natural language, it’s quick and easy to investigate suspicious transactions and move through the recovery steps if you think you’ve experienced fraud.

How AI Financial Defense can help you

Fraudulent charges aren’t always obvious. They can be small enough to evade notice, unclear because of a confusing merchant reference, or simply lost among the many other similar transactions in your statement. AI Financial Defense helps you by bringing suspicious transactions into focus, highlighting potentially fraudulent activity that falls outside your usual spending patterns.

Here are a few examples of how AI Financial Defense could help you catch financial fraud:

• A fraudster tests your card: Someone who stole your card might test if it’s working with a small transaction, hoping you’ll overlook it. But with AI-powered detection, you can spot unusual activity, no matter how small the charge is.
• You get charged by an unknown merchant: It’s not unusual to see unfamiliar merchant references on your statement. Instead of ignoring these transactions, AI Financial Defense will help you understand what they actually are.
• A new recurring payment is set up: The more accounts and subscriptions you have, the easier it is for recurring charges to get lost. AI Financial Defense brings anomalies to your attention, so you can make sure they’re legitimate.

In each situation, AI Financial Defense can help you catch, understand, and investigate transactions that may be fraudulent, providing a valuable financial defense system.

A smarter way to protect your finances

The more bank accounts, cards, and automatic payments you have, the harder it is to stay on top of monitoring for signs of fraud. AI Financial Defense, available in all LifeLock plans, helps solve that problem, providing a simple way to detect payment fraud across all your accounts. Plus, as a LifeLock member, you’ll also get access to credit monitoring, financial account alerts, and up to $10,000 in scam reimbursement coverage with LifeLock Total.*

FAQs

How does AI Financial Defense detect potential fraud?

AI Financial Defense analyzes transactions across all your connected accounts to find unusual trends, unfamiliar merchants, or other activity that doesn’t match your normal spending patterns.

Who is AI Financial Defense for?

AI Financial Defense is designed for anyone with multiple accounts, cards, subscriptions, or recurring payments — all of which can make it harder to manually monitor your transactions for signs of fraud.

Can AI Financial Defense help with unfamiliar charges?

Yes, AI Financial Defense is designed to highlight transactions that stand out as suspicious compared to your normal spending patterns and provide context about the merchant. This can help you identify if unfamiliar charges are legitimate and take the next steps to protect your finances if they’re not.

How is AI Financial Defense different from fraud alerts from my bank?

Bank alerts typically flag charges that look suspicious on an individual level, but AI Financial Defense analyzes your overall financial activity to determine normal spending patterns, flagging outlying charges with better context. Plus, it can observe patterns and provide alerts across multiple accounts with different banks.

Does AI Financial Defense work across multiple accounts?

Yes, one of the main benefits of AI Financial Defense is that it offers a way to monitor for signs of fraud across all of your connected financial accounts at once.