Casap raises $33.5M to fight the fraud customers commit against their own banks

The AI dispute startup is betting that the biggest fraud threat to banks now comes from their own cardholders For decades, card fraud had a familiar villain: a stranger with your stolen numbers. That villain now has company, and it is often the cardholder. Casap, a startup that builds AI tools for handling card disputes and chargebacks, has raised $56 million, according to Fortune. The company’s pitch rests on one uncomfortable shift: cardholders themselves now account for nearly a third of fraudulent transactions. That is a different problem from classic identity theft. The customer is not the victim here. The customer is the one filing the false claim. The rise of the “white lie” chargeback The industry calls this first-party fraud. A customer buys something, receives it, then tells the bank the purchase never happened or the item never arrived. The bank reverses the charge, and someone else absorbs the loss. Casap’s CEO says the behavior often comes from how people rationalize it. “It comes back to people thinking ‘this is a victimless crime, banks have a lot of money and I need money’, so people tell what they think are white lies,” said Shanthi Shanmugam, Casap’s CEO and co-fo...