TrustSphere
 

AI agents are now placing orders, comparing prices and completing checkouts on behalf of consumers and businesses, and the volume of agent-initiated commerce is compounding faster than the trust frameworks that are supposed to govern it. The fraud surface looks unfamiliar because the buyer is not a person — and most of the industry's authentication, mandate and recourse models assume that it is.

Quishing — phishing via malicious QR code — has graduated from a niche social-engineering technique to a mainstream payments attack. The combination of post-pandemic QR ubiquity, account-to-account payment rails activated by camera scan and the ease with which a printed sticker can overlay a legitimate code has produced a year-on-year growth rate that few internal fraud teams budgeted for. The UK's Action Fraud reported a 587% rise in QR-code phishing reports between 2023 and

The UK's mandatory APP-scam reimbursement regime has been in force since October 2024, and the scheme data is finally giving us a clean picture of what works at the point of payment and what does not. The headline finding is straightforward — Confirmation of Payee, in its first-generation form, was a useful but porous control, and the 50/50 reimbursement liability split between sending and receiving PSPs has placed real economic pressure on both sides to do better. Confirmati

Agentic commerce — where AI agents browse, compare, and complete purchases on behalf of their human principal — is moving from research demonstration to live deployment. Major platforms and payment providers are publishing protocols, identity frameworks, and merchant onboarding specifications designed to let autonomous agents transact at scale.

Agentic commerce — autonomous AI agents researching, negotiating and transacting on behalf of consumers and businesses — has crossed from novelty to measurable share of e-commerce volume in 2026. Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay and the OpenAI Operator and Anthropic Claude integrations now collectively process meaningful daily transaction volumes. The merchant-side and issuer-side fraud frameworks for these flows are still catching up. The harder problem, incre

As AI agents move from research demonstrations to live transactions, the question is no longer whether they will buy on a consumer's behalf — it is who is liable when they buy the wrong thing. The 2026 work on agent identity, payment mandates, and audit trail is rapidly becoming the load-bearing infrastructure of agentic commerce.

The battle against fraud has become a high-stakes race between technology innovators and malicious actors. The rise of advanced digital...