--- title: IAFCI, part 3: Bust Out Fraud and What’s Trending source_page: https://www.sardine.ai/media/fraud-forward/episodes/bust-out-fraud canonical: https://www.sardine.ai/media/fraud-forward/episodes/bust-out-fraud format: text/markdown date: 2026-09-23T04:01:00.000Z description: Top fraud fighters break down what’s trending in 2026. An IAFCI Nashville recap of bust out fraud, auto lending schemes, business email compromise, and more… --- **Quick links:** [Human page](https://www.sardine.ai/media/fraud-forward/episodes/bust-out-fraud) · [Home](https://www.sardine.ai) · [Customers](https://www.sardine.ai/customers) · [Blog](https://www.sardine.ai/blog) · [Demo](https://www.sardine.ai/demo) --- # IAFCI, part 3: Bust Out Fraud and What’s Trending **Published:** 2026-09-23T04:01:00.000Z Top fraud fighters break down what’s trending in 2026. An IAFCI Nashville recap of bust out fraud, auto lending schemes, business email compromise, and more… What’s up fraud fighters, and welcome back to Fraud Forward! I am bringing you more from here at IAFCI in Nashville. I've caught up with fraud fighters, bank executives, and law enforcement leaders for a rapid-fire soundcheck on where fraud is headed. I've been asking everyone I sit down with the same question. If you had one word to describe fraud in 2026, what would it be? The answers ranged from trending and explosive, to complex, and evolving. Sometimes fraud couldn't be contained by only one word. Honestly, they all fit. There were so many great conversations this week. They didn't fit into one episode. They barely fit into two. So this episode is a rapid series of conversations covering everything from bust out fraud to elder fraud prevention, dealership schemes, and where IAFCI itself is headed under new leadership. Every one of these conversations left me with something I want to bring straight back to you. These conversations are not just about what we are facing. But also how we can overcome the rising challenges in our community, the tools, the collaboration, and the partnerships between law enforcement and banking that are only getting stronger. Let's get into it. What you'll hear in this episode: Why bust out fraud is being called a real hot topic right now. How these rings are migrating away from California and Florida as enforcement catches up. How auto lending fraud, first party fraud, and income misrepresentation are showing up together. Why leaning on consortium data and application data fraud signals is more important than relying on credit reports alone. How dealerships that barely exist are financing cars that were never actually delivered. Why business email compromise is still a top concern on the commercial banking side, and the stop call and confirm habit that stops it cold. Building a fraud prevention platform started with understanding the problem firsthand by moving into senior living communities. A fresh way to think about scam education as a behavior change problem, not just an awareness problem. Why check fraud trends remain a serious concern for community bank fraud programs, even as fraudsters increasingly bring AI targeted fraud attacks to smaller institutions. How law enforcement bank collaboration through IAFCI industry working groups is turning strangers into the people you call when a case needs to move fast. What's ahead for IAFCI itself, including new fraud policy and regulation partnerships and a membership goal of 10,000 by the end of the current term. You should listen to this episode if you: Work in auto lending, dealership finance, or first party fraud detection and want real, current examples of bust out fraud. Are on the commercial banking side and want a reminder of how effective stop call and confirm still is against business email compromise. Care about elder fraud prevention and want to hear how one approach was built from direct, in-person research. Lead fraud or risk at a community bank and want perspective on check fraud trends and AI targeted fraud attacks hitting smaller institutions. Believe law enforcement bank collaboration is underrated and want real examples of what that actually looks like in practice. Want a fast-moving, one-word-answer kind of episode that still leaves you with real, usable takeaways. ### Episode notes Fraud sitting under collections, and a dealership fraud story Monica White, a fraud and collections manager at Florida Credit Union, with fraud living under the collections umbrella. She made a strong case for it. Charge-offs aren't always just bad loans or bad decisions. A lot of them are first party fraud, synthetic identities, or false information on an application. Having fraud and collections connected, even if they're not the same team, catches things a purely siloed structure would miss. She also walked me through a dealership fraud scheme her institution is dealing with, title lien stripping tied to vehicles that were financed and never actually delivered, sometimes for dealerships that barely exist. Because law enforcement often treats it as a civil matter, it slips through in a way straightforward fraud wouldn't. Her advice for any fraud fighter was simple, get outside your comfort zone and talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to. Business email compromise and the five minute phone call that stops it Jeff Taylor works commercial banking fraud and told me business email compromise is still what he sees every single day, alongside a rise in account takeover on the commercial side. His fix is the simple and repeatable stop, call, and confirm. Call the requester back at a number you already know and trust before moving money, and you can stop most business email compromise attempts cold. He described traveling across his bank's footprint helping commercial clients put that control in place, with real, measurable results, stopped transactions and real money saved. His one word for 2026 was complex, since AI and large language models are now producing spoofed vendor emails convincing enough to fool people who know better. He suggested a simple gut check. Look up the routing and account number on a payment request and ask whether it actually makes sense for that vendor's bank to be located where it is. Building SilverShield from inside senior living communities Alec Glassman is the founder and CEO of SilverShield, an anti-scam platform built specifically to help protect older adults. He spent two months living in a retirement community in Florida and two weeks in a senior and assisted living community in rural Ohio, just to understand the people he was trying to help. He told me almost everything he originally assumed about the problem turned out to be wrong, and that experience completely reshaped the product. On the conference itself, he was struck by the sheer breadth of people in the room, credit union and bank investigators alongside HHS, Secret Service, and federal, state, and city investigators all working together. Something he said is genuinely hard to appreciate from outside this world. His one word was evolving, and his closing advice was empathy. How you approach victims directly determines whether you can actually help them. Bust out fraud and first party fraud in auto lending Jen Lamont has been in banking for 21 years but is brand new to IAFCI. Her role recently shifted from practitioner to the tech side, now fighting fraud from within auto lending specifically. The trends she's seeing most right now are bust out fraud, first party fraud, and income misrepresentation. With income misrepresentation standing out as the biggest one. Her organization has moved away from relying heavily on credit reports and toward consortium data and application data instead, specifically to catch the anomalies that credit history alone won't surface. Her focus right now is collaboration, information sharing, and consortium data, since none of this gets solved by any one institution working alone. Why bust out rings keep moving Bust out fraud is one of the most persistent problems in this industry, a perpetual whack-a-mole. As enforcement improves in known hotspots like California and Florida, the rings simply shift toward the middle of the country instead of disappearing. The growing participation in industry groups like the Auto Finance Coalition is one of the few things actually moving the needle, along with just getting organizations to acknowledge and name the problem clearly enough to act on it. Auto Finance Coalition, Bank Fraud, BSA AML and Anti-Money Laundering, Bust-Out and Synthetic Identities, Cyber Fraud, Cryptocurrency, Human Trafficking, Mortgage Fraud Task Force, Organized Retail Crime, Scams and Financial Exploitation, and Skimming and Payment Terminal Attacks. This is the full list of the IAFCI groups working together. Scott Ellefson wants to remind you that if feel like you are the only fraud person in your organization, you are not alone. Scott Anchin on community banks catching up fast Scott Anchin is SVP of Strategic Initiatives and Policy at the Independent Community Bankers of America. Fraud and scams sit squarely in his current focus because they hit community banks exactly where their advantage lives, their community relationships. Check fraud remains a significant, ongoing problem. And it's not going away simply because check volume is dropping, since fraudsters have noticed that the average dollar amount per check is rising as volume falls. He also confirmed something I've suspected for a while, community banks that fraudsters once mostly ignored in favor of bigger institutions are now getting hit with the exact same sophisticated, AI-driven attacks as everyone else. When I brought up a recent episode I recorded with Linker Finance about digital onboarding, he made the point that community banks tend to adopt new fraud prevention technology in a measured, strategic way, which fits with how hands-on and relationship-driven their onboarding already is. He also told me ICBA and IAFCI just released a jointly authored guide called the Partnership Framework for Mutual Success, available on ICBA.org, meant to help community bankers and law enforcement build real partnerships. Treating scam prevention as behavior change, not just awareness Heather Noss founded Scam Ready Family after her own father was the victim of a nearly $200,000 scam that started with a scareware popup on his computer. She managed to get all of that money back for him, largely because she caught it quickly and put in an intense, multi-day effort. Her background is in change management and behavior change rather than finance or law enforcement, and that shapes her entire approach. Her core argument is that telling someone facts about scams doesn't change behavior any more than telling someone to exercise makes them exercise. So she built scamreadyfamily.com, free AI-generated video simulations that narrate the psychological manipulation happening in real scams as they unfold, and in her in-person talks, she has people actually practice hanging up the phone on a scammer under simulated pressure, so the response is already there when real stress hits. Her one word was fakery, or deception, and she raised something I hadn't fully considered, since so many old signals of legitimacy are gone now, learning how to identify a source you can actually trust has become its own skill people need to be taught. What’s next for IAFCI Chris Gergni became IAFCI's executive director six months ago after nearly 29 years in nonprofit and event management. What struck me most was how personally he described the organization. People join plenty of associations because they care, but he said this one goes deeper because of how personal the stakes are. Hearing about the actual grandmother, the single mom, or the elderly victim behind every case. Steve Lenderman was sworn in the night before we talked as IAFCI's incoming international president, a term that officially begins January 1, 2027. He's been a member for 21 years, including eight as a chapter president. He told me he was originally brought into the organization by someone else, which is exactly why he sees growing the next generation of fraud fighters as part of his own responsibility now. He also spoke to something I'd heard about earlier that week, a member in the Carolinas who used an IAFCI connection to reach an NYPD contact and arrange a same-day welfare check on a fraud victim. Steve called it professional courtesy, a layer of trust and collaboration that exists here specifically because everyone in the room is ultimately working toward the same goal. ### Key takeaways Bust out fraud continues to migrate geographically as enforcement improves in known hotspots, making it a persistent, whack-a-mole style challenge. Auto lending fraud increasingly involves first party fraud and income misrepresentation, and consortium data is outperforming credit reports alone for detection. Legitimate-looking dealerships can commit real fraud, including title lien stripping fraud tied to vehicles that were never delivered. Business email compromise remains highly preventable through a simple stop, call, and confirm habit. Elder fraud prevention is more effective when built from direct, firsthand research into how older adults actually experience scams. Scam education works better as a practiced behavior change than as a one-time awareness lecture. Check fraud trends are rising as fewer checks carry higher dollar amounts, and AI targeted fraud attacks are now reaching community banks, not just large institutions. Law enforcement bank collaboration through networks like IAFCI regularly turns into real, fast case resolutions. ### Final takeaway If there's one thing these conversations made clear, it's that fraud in 2026 doesn't have just one word, it has all of them at once. Trending. Complex. Evolving. Every single person I talked to this week is fighting a different piece of the same fight, whether that's a bust out ring quietly moving states or a single phone call that stops a business email compromise attempt cold. The thread connecting all of it is the same one IAFCI keeps proving works. None of us are meant to fight this alone. Episode resources & links Connect with Steve Lendermen | LinkedIn Head of Fraud Prevention at iSolved Connect with Scott Anchin | LinkedIn Senior VP Strategic Initiatives and Policy at ICBA Connect with Jen Lamont | LinkedIn Fraud Strategist at Point Predictive Connect with Jeff Taylor | LinkedIn SVP Head of Fraud Forensics at Regions Bank Connect with Heather Noss | LinkedIn Founder at Scam Ready Family Scam Ready Family Connect with Scott Ellefson | LinkedIn Fraud Consulting Manager at Point Predictive Connect with Chris Gergeni | LinkedIn Executive Director at IAFCI Connect with Alec Glassman | LinkedIn CEO & Founder at SilverShield Connect With Monica White | LinkedIn Fraud & Collections Manager at Florida Credit Union Connect with Hailey Windham, CFCS | LinkedIn Host of the Fraud Forward Podcast Banking Community Lead at Sardine Certified Financial Crimes Specialist (CFCS) 2023 Credit Union Rockstar, CU Magazine Continuous Improvement Award, SAFE Federal Credit Union, 2023 Top 20 Professionals Under 40, The Sumter Item, 2022