Predictive Prevention: How Brazil’s Banks Can Stop Pix Scams Before They Happen

The State of Scams Brazil 2026 Global Anti-Scam Alliance report reveals a concerning scenario: annual financial losses from scams in the country exceed R$21.2 billion, and 81% of the adult population is frequently exposed to scam attempts.¹ 

This data confirms that scammers are becoming increasingly creative and diversified, covering virtually every available market segment of potential victims. But as troubling as this finding is, it highlights a path forward to stronger scam prevention. A combined strategy involving multi-sector collaboration that combines resources and technology across platforms, banks, telecommunications, government, law enforcement, and above all, consumers, is urgently needed to catch scams before they result in losses.

Key Findings

• Annual financial losses from scams in Brazil exceed R$21.2 billion, with 81% of the adult population frequently exposed to scam attempts, according to GASA Research.¹
• While 42% of Brazilians feel confident in their ability to identify a scam, 56% of those exposed ultimately interact with fraudulent activity.¹
• Brazil’s Pix system has enabled faster transactions, but also faster fraud. This requires precision-level defense to prevent scams before money is lost.
• To effectively combat digital crime, the financial ecosystem must shift to predictive prevention by analyzing real-time behavioral signals to intercept coerced transactions.
• A multi-sector strategy where banks, telecom providers, and the government work together is essential to prevent scams.

The Perception Gap: the Human Impact of Fraud

GASA’s report shows that although 42% of Brazilians claim to trust their ability to identify a scam. Yet more than half (56%) reported interacting with some form of fraud.

Among those who interacted, 25% lost money or provided data that led to financial loss driven by false promises of financial gains through investments, easy debt settlement, purchases of products at “unmissable” prices, and even fake contacts and interactions with scammers posing as bank employees or managers.

This impact is not just economic. Victims state that the scam affected their mental well-being and created a deep distrust of digital tools. This distrust affects the services financial institutions provide, leading customers to abandon tools designed to bring convenience and trust.

Prioritizing Trust in Brazil’s Economy by Securing Pix from Scams

Brazil is at the forefront of financial technology. We are a global benchmark and have been exporting expertise for quite some time. A prime example is our Pix payment system, a source of envy and discussion in other countries that feel disadvantaged by the speed and practicality instant transfers have brought to the Brazilian financial market, along with increased financial inclusion and efficiency.

However, we have become hostages to a technology that made life even easier for those who wake up thinking about how to steal money from others, fundamentally changing the dynamics of fraud for the worse. In Brazil, one out of four scams results in financial loss within seconds. Today, many traditional prevention models that are based on rigid rules or end-of-day batch processing have become obsolete and purely reactive. 

The major challenge for the banking market is not just stopping losses, but preserving customer trust in the digital ecosystem. We can no longer afford the luxury of merely being proactive. The key solution is prediction that acts before fraud occurs, not after.

Let’s look at some of the numbers reflecting this need:

The primary contact channels used by scammers are:

• Phone calls: 53%
• Instant messaging apps: 49%
• Email: 39%
• SMS: 38%
• Social networks: 28%
• Digital advertising: 19%

Among specific platforms, WhatsApp ranks first, cited by 64% of victims, followed by Gmail at 32%.

As the numbers above show, scams do not happen solely through hacking a victim’s app or cell phone, but by manipulating victims into making the transfer or payment.

Precision Defense: The Need for Real-time Behavioral Analysis

The data reinforces the need to act beforehand and take a step back. Every transaction or payment stems from a motivation, an action, and a behavior. These patterns can uniquely identify each customer. To effectively counter the dynamics of digital crime rings, the financial ecosystem must shift from reaction to predictive prevention.

When discussing predictive prevention, we must look a step ahead of the transaction or payment and analyze the subtlest signals of how users interact with their devices in real time (typing cadence, touch patterns, hesitation, and phone movement). Thoroughly analyzing changes in these signals helps identify indicators of stress, coercion, or atypical behavior during the transaction, allowing us to intercept the operation even when the victim authorizes it under the scammer’s influence.

By focusing on the entire lifecycle and all the events leading up to the transaction (instead of just the transaction itself), we gain a much broader view of the situation. We can assess the involved risks with far greater precision. The word precision is used intentionally here, as it reflects the correlation of hundreds of thousands of historical and behavioral signals in mere milliseconds.

From Consumer Vigilance to Seamless Protection

Small precautions can make a major difference: avoid interacting with unsolicited communications, check links and email addresses for odd domains or uncommon extensions, research the company’s reputation, consult trusted people, and, naturally, contact institutions through their official channels. Avoid using links, phone numbers, or instructions sent in a suspicious message.

We cannot rely solely on awareness campaigns, consumer education, and individual judgment to decide whether a website, contact, or interaction is legitimate. Institutions must act subtly, without unnecessary friction, and intelligently when correlating and understanding data.

The ongoing process of reporting scams remains an important variable in this equation, as it fuels the feedback loop, helps us understand new fraud typologies, and enables intelligence sharing between institutions and the government.

A great example of this is MED 2.0, a recent regulatory update to Pix. While MED 2.0 operates in the “post-fraud” phase (damage mitigation and asset recovery after the scam has happened), solutions like Feedzai operate in the “pre-fraud” phase (preventing suspicious transactions in real time).

These systems complement each other: Feedzai intelligence reduces the volume of fraudulent transactions that get executed, while MED 2.0 acts as a safety net to recover capital when a victim is manipulated through social engineering into making the transfer themselves.

Why a Multi-Sector Strategy is Essential for Scam Prevention

GASA’s data highlights the need for a combined strategy: scam victims place the highest responsibility for protection on the online platforms used by criminals (26%), followed by the government (17%), individual responsibility (14%), banks and payment processors (9%), and telecom operators (7%).

This shows there is immense room to build a unified strategy where banks, telecom providers, and the government act together seamlessly, leaving no loopholes or gaps for scammers to exploit. It is the clearest definition of the saying, “Unity is strength.” Or in this case, “Unity is scam prevention.”

Additional Resources

• Blog: Why the Future of Fraud Prevention Belongs to Connected Data Layers
• eBook: The Blueprint for a World of Safer Money
• Solution Brief: The Intelligence to Spot a Scam. The Speed to Stop It.
• Solution: Scam Detection & Prevention Solutions