Why Every Fraud Fighter Should Invest in Continuing Education
Nobody hands you a syllabus for this job. There's no traditional academic path or undergraduate degree in fraud prevention, and certainly no major that prepares you for the day a synthetic identity slips past your rules engine. Most of us fell into this industry sideways: a support role that turned into a chargeback queue, a risk analyst seat that turned into a career. For me, it was emotional: as part of the Customer Success team at Google, I was fed up with fraudsters abusing our platform and wanted to be part of shutting it down. That focus led me to join the Risk team, and the rest is history.
That kind of hands-on learning gets you far. It also has a ceiling. Fourteen years across risk, chargebacks, underwriting, spam, and trust and safety at Meta, Square, and Google taught me that the job never holds still long enough for on-the-job training alone to keep up. The tactics move. The regulations move. Right now, that means AI-generated credential stuffing scripts and synthetic identities. Synthetic identity fraud is now the fastest-growing fraud type globally, an eight-fold increase year over year.
The only way I've found to stay ahead of that curve, for myself and for the teams I've managed, is to treat learning as infrastructure, not an extra.
What ongoing education actually buys you
Here's where it shows up in practice:
You catch patterns faster. You already see fraud attempts every day. But your caseload only shows you what's hitting your company. A peer briefing or an industry report shows you what's hitting everyone else, before it hits you.
You cut false positives. Blocking a legitimate customer has a real cost, even if it never lands on a loss report the way a fraud loss does. In Sift's own customer research, nearly a quarter of shoppers who had a legitimate purchase declined took their business to a competitor instead, a number that climbed to 36% among Gen Z. The teams that build better models, write tighter rules, and develop smarter thresholds are usually the ones who've studied what didn't work somewhere else first.
You stand on firmer regulatory ground. Regulations change, and they change differently by geography. That's a constant if you're in iGaming or fintech, but it reaches further than that. Card network and money transfer policy shifts touch fraud operations everywhere.
You learn to speak in business terms. The fastest way to win headcount for a fraud team is to translate the work into numbers leadership already tracks: revenue preserved, losses avoided. That's a vocabulary you build, not one you're born with.
Building the habit without blowing up your schedule
Every fraud team is understaffed. It's easy to tell yourself you'll get to the reading once the queue clears. I've been doing this long enough to know that moment rarely arrives.
So don't wait for it. Treat continuing education like a habit, not a project, the same way you'd treat fitness or reading. One hour a week beats zero, every time.
Start smaller than that if you have to. Pick two or three of the newsletters already sitting unread in your inbox and give them fifteen minutes a day. Or block thirty minutes for a webinar and fifteen more afterward to ask yourself what actually applies to your work. Build a peer network alongside it, Slack groups, LinkedIn communities, conference hallway conversations. It's one of the few things in this job where you get out roughly what you put in.
Industry education providers like the Merchant Risk Council offer courses that can help you strengthen your knowledge in specific areas before deciding which certification is the next right step. Sift's Trust Academy Series is an interactive and accessible way to start your professional development journey. Courses include 10-minute video modules with short quizzes that introduce concepts covered in official industry certification programs.
From there, you can move into more structured professional development. Industry certifications like the Certified Payments & Fraud Prevention Professional (CPFPP), Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE), Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS), and Certified Financial Crime Specialist (CFCS) build skills and provide credentials that demonstrate professional expertise.
Treating continuing education as part of the job, not a nice-to-have, compounds the value. New opportunities open up and earning potential shifts. You become the kind of practitioner other people want on their team.
About Sift
Sift is the leading fraud prevention platform delivering digital trust to 700+ global brands, allowing them to grow confidently by stopping fraud while enabling excellence in customer experience. Backed by a global data network of over one trillion annual events, Sift helps companies convert risk into revenue and scale without compromise. Brands including Hertz, Yelp, and Poshmark rely on Sift to unlock growth and deliver seamless consumer experiences.
Contact us
To learn more, visit sift.com.
About the author
Kevin Lee is Field Chief Technology Officer at Sift. He helps customers implement strategies that cross-functionally align risk and revenue programs. Prior to Sift, he spent over 14 years leading various risk, chargeback, spam/scams, and trust and safety organizations at Meta, Square, and Google. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/in/thisisklee.
