Annually, over 15 million people choose Barcelona as their business or leisure destination, and, for the third year in a row, I was one of them. Expect crowded streets near worldwide renowned attractions, delicious food, and a vibrant atmosphere way past midnight. Prepare for one of the country’s hardest power outages. Panic about the lack of cash, reroute, and take a walk on the beach to remind yourself why you chose this city in the first place.
This year, the MRC celebrated their 25th anniversary, proving resilience and relevance in the fast-paced world of payments and fraud prevention. The three-day event was packed with high-quality panels, stellar content, and around 600 attendees from all over the world. Gathered inside the Barcelona International Convention Center (CCIB), it was hard to understand the panic that slowly started to install on a Monday noon, at the end of April. Privileged enough to attend insightful panels and discuss about the latest trends in the payments and fraud industries, we were left clueless with the world outside. Minutes after noon, the national and international media outlets started writing about the massive power outage hitting Spain, France, and Portugal. What was considered at first a minor hiccup in the system would soon turn into quite the panic as most buildings wouldn’t restore power until the next morning, interfering with the daily lives of millions of people.
Ironically, industry events often promote new digital payment methods and integrations with e-wallets, disregarding cash as obsolete. But how are you expected to purchase, pay, travel, or eat when technology fails you at every step?
Moving freely inside the bubble, the MRC Barcelona 2025 attendees were lucky enough to benefit from all perks of modern technologies – chilly rooms, live presentations from industry leaders, high-impact keynotes, workshops, and plenty of breakout sessions designed to connect with industry peers.
The event featured a wide array of panels focusing on various topics in the fraud and payments realms, with dozens of professionals sharing insights from international merchants activating in diverse verticals, including luxury goods, travelling, gaming and gambling, subscription payments, mobility, and more. Newbies and those looking to deepen their understanding of also had the chance to participate in workshops, while merchants-only focus groups were designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and handle today’s complex problems. This year’s main topics approached included:
GenAI and Agentic AI
Tokenization
Account takeover
Omnichannel payments
Payments optimisation
Trust and safety
Dark web and cybercrime
First-party misuse
Chargebacks and regulations
Payments orchestration
Real-time payments
Authentication
Fraud-prevention
Policy abuse and promo fraud
The MRC 2025 Payments and Fraud Report already tackled some of these pain-points and their importance, as shared by interviews and discussions with thousands of merchants worldwide. Policy abuse and promo fraud were heavily discussed in 2024 and continued to impact merchants in 2025, causing them billions of dollars loss in revenues and affecting their customer trust and loyalty.
Unsurprisingly, AI remained another hot topic among panellists, with companies going to extreme lengths to fight AI-generated content leveraged by fraudsters for romantic scams, phishing and vishing attacks, deepfakes, synthetic identities, card testing, and account takeover. However, as the technology continues to develop, a new type of AI has risen – agentic AI, your personal agent to automate tasks, take cost-effective decisions for you, and assist with every aspect of your life – including committing fraud.
As fraud becomes the new ecommerce pandemic, scammers are joining forces to create sophisticated structures to streamline their illicit revenues, resembling the internal structures of high-tech organisations. Fraud rings leverage thousands of fraudsters, deploy the latest tech, and discuss heavily on forums and end-to-end encrypted social media platforms like Telegram on how to coordinate attacks to cause as much damage to merchants as possible. Combined with human trafficking, money laundering, and mule accounts, the intricacies of fraud rings were long debated at the 2025 Barcelona event.
Finally, checkout optimisation, tokenization, and payment orchestration were also among the hot topics on this year’s agenda, with panellists discussing the latest developments.
Similar to the previous editions of the event, the panels were structured in two separate fields – payments and fraud. For me, the first morning of the conference started with a crash-course on GenAI aiming to unravel how this new tech is transforming payments, risk, and fraud in ecommerce.
To break the ice, the panellists suggested a short exercise – diving the group into smaller groups of two people, with each individual playing either the role of a fraudster or a fraud fighter. Using one type of GenAI, the fraudster then tried to trick the victim, while the fraud fighter was looking into unmasking the bad actor with the help of another type of GenAI.
The exercise aimed at showing the duality of Generative AI and how it can be leveraged both by fraudsters and fraud fighters. Later on, professionals from Cartrawler and Google explored real-world applications of AI in businesses and how this technology can be used to optimise fraud detection, enhance customer verification, and streamline the payment processes.
The second day of the event started with a presentation on balancing automation and expertise to combat fraud in 2025,presented by Signifyd. Consumer abuse and refund fraud ranked as the most common types of fraud experienced by merchants in 2024, with chargebacks following closely behind. Merchants must now work closely with fraud prevention solution providers to deploy a series of measures to combat the problem, including shifting towards less lax return and refund policies, flagging suspicious return behaviour, proof of returnal, and swapping cash refunds to store credit.
The panel ‘Mastering multi-region, multi-brand fraud prevention under one roof: Puig’s journey’ tackled the challenges in handling major brands internationally under one roof. The presentation focused on Puig, a luxury/fashion/beauty company and how various brands require various fraud prevention strategies or a different mix of local payment methods. The expert shared insights on how the business handles promo abuse, refund fraud, multi-accounting, and fraud rings, and how it aims to make refunds easier for loyal, good customers.
The panel also focused on how AI is leveraged to create deepfakes which are later used by fraudsters in refund scams. And even though deepfakes are yet easy to spot, this type of Generative AI is rapidly evolving and may pose serious threats to merchants in the future.
Perhaps one of the most anticipated presentations in the 2025 edition of the MRC Barcelona conference was a live account takeover face-off, featuring experts from Darwinium and Apollo.io. The panellists played the roles of a fraudster using different types of AI tools (including an AI agent) to hack into accounts and a passionate fraud fighter looking to close all loopholes and stop attacks before causing damage to a company. There were three account takeover attempts presented, each more intense and complex than the previous one that tested the fraud fighter to the limit.
The live demo aimed to provide an in-depth analysis of mitigation strategies that work, as well as best practice approaches when looking to anticipate a next wave of attack. The best part? The party favour for guests who wanted to further test the capabilities of an AI agent or test their luck into creating the perfect bait website for victims.
Finally, the panel on fraud rings featuring experts from FanDuel and Geocomply – ‘Inside fraud rings: how verified account trafficking undermines your platform’ tackled the rising problem of fraud rings and their real effects on merchants. FanDuel, a US-based platform specialised in sports betting, fantasy sports, and casino games shared valuable tips and tricks on fighting fraud and minimising the risk of future attacks. Hit by fraudsters a few times, the platform even had to terminate their ‘Refer to a Friend’ loyalty programme due to fraudster attacks. And, even when the company imposed new, stricter rules and added extra layers of friction to stop bad actors from creating multi accounts or using stolen aged accounts, fraudsters showed resilience and quickly adjusted.
MRC Barcelona feels more like home each year. Familiar faces, interesting discussions, and plenty of interactive panels to look forward to. The event aims to bring together merchants, solution providers, and regulators to educate on ecommerce’s biggest challenges. For me, MRC Barcelona represents the perfect mix of insightful panels, networking opportunities, workshops, and informal discussions with merchants that keep me on the path of learning.
Fraud is here to stay. A learning point for the entire industry is that fraud is omnipresent. It doesn’t hit specific verticals or merchants but will target weaker brands that do not continuously invest in new methods and strategies to deter bad actors. It is not a question of who will be targeted but rather when and betting your company’s revenues on a single fraud fighting strategy may prove dangerous in the long run.
Proactiveness is the key to fighting fraud. As fraudsters become more tech-savvy, their attacks will become more sophisticated too. Leveraging new, modern technologies, they will find weaknesses and loopholes to exploit in your defences. Thus, having a fraud team that only fights fraud after it happened will not be enough to safeguard your revenues. Fraud teams must elaborate more efficient fraud prevention solutions to prevent fraud and should be flexible enough to adapt these solutions in real time.
Hyperpersonalisation will become the new norm. The further development of AI agents will lead to the hyperpersonalisation of payments, in an attempt to increase financial literacy and inclusion. AI Agents will not only automate and streamline work processes but will have the autonomy of taking efficient decisions for businesses and for us – reroute payments until payment acceptance, restock products, and enhance customer services.
Balancing the online and offline. In a highly digitalised and fast-paced world, we often rely on technologies to make our lives easier – we pay with our phones, order food online, we rely solely on our cards and e-wallets to travel, and we even leverage AI to automate tasks. While technology is present in every aspect of our daily lives, there still needs to be a balance between the benefits of online and the calmness of offline. As AI continues to develop, it will require massive resources of water and energy, which could lead to more often power outages. So, what will be the point of asking ChatGPT about your next dinner if you don’t have cash in your pocket to pay for it?
Irina is a Senior Editor at The Paypers, primarily specialising in online payments and fraud prevention. She has a Ph.D. in Economics and a strong economic academic background, with interests in fraud prevention, chargebacks, fintech, ecommerce, and online payments. You can reach out to her via LinkedIn or email at irina@thepaypers.com.
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