Mastercard implements risk-rating tool to deter crypto fraud activity

Yahoo Finance reporter David Hollerith joins the Live show to break down Mastercard's new tool for fending off crypto fraud.

Video transcript

- Bitcoin seeing its first October spike above $20,000. Cryptocurrencies have been a common target for theft, though. In fact, the crypto industry lost $428 million in the third quarter to hackers and fraud. That's according to a recent report from [? Imunify. ?] Now, it's one of the reasons why Mastercard is diving deeper into crypto with a new tool to combat fraud. Yahoo Finance's David Hollerith has the details. Hey, David.

DAVID HOLLERITH: Hey, [? Rochelle. ?] The tool uses artificial intelligence to comb through blockchain transactions so banks and other card issuers that use the company's payments network can more easily mitigate fraud and essentially assess crypto merchants for their level of risk. So effectively, the tool gives a color-coded risk rating to different crypto merchants. And the vendors or the pay-- the network issuers-- users, excuse me-- can sort of decide what they want to do from that standpoint. And the product is run by CipherTrace, which is a blockchain analytics firm which was acquired by Mastercard a little-- about a year ago.

But as far as crypto fraud goes, fraud was $14 billion last year, according to Chainalysis. And that number is expected to drop this year, mostly due to the decline in cryptocurrency prices all together. But that being said, this latest effort by Mastercard is interesting in that, you know, given the high fraud and, as you pointed out, particularly high levels of theft this year, the company is looking to sort of be a trailblazer for banking compliance.

- Well, certainly an interesting position for a lot of these crypto companies. The more transparency the better, at least for consumers. David Hollerith, thank you so much.