MPC Interviews Scott Adams of Fraud Deflect
Please tell us your name, title, company, and email address to provide to prospective participants interested in receiving more information.
Scott E. Adams, the CEO & Co-founder of Fraud Deflect.
My email address is Scott@frauddeflect.com but you can also go to https://frauddeflect.com/scott-e-adams-2025 or our website at www.frauddeflect.com for more information about me and our company.
How are you different than other brands in your space?
I was an online merchant for years and have a man-on-the-street view of what business owners go through every day. When it comes to fraud and chargebacks, merchants just want a solution that works, that doesn’t get in the way of doing business, and helps them keep more of their hard-earned revenue. We put the merchants and partners that serve them first with our innovative technology that produces outstanding results reducing chargebacks by 90+% and the fraud that causes them. It’s our goal to stop disputes before they become chargebacks, automatically, so the merchant never has to deal with them.
How would you describe your value proposition to prospective customers and channel partners?
Think of us as the invisible firewall between your revenue and the digital underworld. At Fraud Deflect, we don’t just manage the fallout of a bad transaction; we rewrite the script of the transaction itself.
The Stack: Proprietary Intelligence
We’ve built FDID Technology, a high-fidelity fingerprinting engine that tracks device behavior and checkout telemetry in real-time. When a dispute is sparked, we don’t just send a memo; we feed a wealth of merchant data directly to the issuing banks. It’s a data-rich collaboration that kills “friendly fraud” in its tracks by giving banks the evidence they need to say no to the customer’s claim.
The “Prevent First” Strategy
Most firms are reactive; they’re janitors cleaning up after a chargeback mess. We’re architects. Our strategy is simple: The best alert is the one that never happens. We intercept disputes at the source, stopping them before they ever hit your dashboard. We aren’t just saving your money; we’re saving the sale.
- Zero Engineering, Max Visibility
- Plug-and-Play: We’re a full-service partner with zero merchant engineering required. You keep selling; we keep guarding.
- Radical Transparency: Our UI isn’t a black box. With direct feeds to the card brands, we provide mid-level, real-time reporting on fraud and VAMP metrics. You see what we see, the second it happens.
The Human Element
Algorithms are great, but experience is the kill-switch. Our team brings 60+ years of deep-trench expertise across fintech, engineering, and fraud forensics. We’ve seen every exploit in the book, and we built Fraud Deflect to close the library for good.
We don’t just mitigate risk; we engineer it out of the equation.
What recent challenges have your company’s leadership faced and how did you overcome them?
Our technology and our technology partners like Mastercard, Ethoca, Visa, and Verify as well as our decades of experience have led to explosive growth. That growth is coming both domestically and internationally. Keeping up with global growth and helping customers one on one, that is a challenge for any leadership team. It has pushed us to automate nearly every aspect of the process, so nothing is left waiting for us to respond. With a fully remote team, clear communication is key to achieving our goals, managing our growth, and continually developing better products. Our customers tell us our product is the best on the market so we must be doing something right.
What recent milestone have you achieved and why is it significant?
In the last few months, we have added several upgraded features to our platform. FD.ID technology is behavioral device ID that help identify fraud before disputes become chargebacks and gives us added data to deflect chargebacks before they occur.
Just a couple of months ago, we became the only service provider to integrate with Mastercard/Ethoca’s Smart Subscription service helping to reduce losses from companies in the subscription economy. This is a huge benefit to merchants that rely on subscription services for their business.
Recently, we have shown that our pre-chargeback defense has deflected as much as 80% of chargebacks before they become chargebacks.
Here’s is a document that shows what we have been able to achieve for merchants of all types: https://frauddeflect.com/solutions.
What near-term opportunities will 2026 present to you and your team?
Within a couple weeks, we will be launching automated boarding for merchants of our partners. This system will get merchants onto the system in a matter of hours and not days. That’s huge for partners and merchants that are having issues right now. We can have them boarded and taking advantage of our latest technology, reducing chargebacks, reducing cost and losses. Our partners love this.
What’s a key trend for your industry in 2026, and why do you think it’s important?
Chargebacks and the regulations that govern them are constantly changing. Just last year Visa introduced the Visa Acquirers Monitoring Program, also known as VAMP. This has been a significant change in the way acquirers, payment providers, ISOs, and the like measure the fraud and chargebacks of each merchant in their portfolio. It combined several programs into one and has caused confusion and put merchants’ accounts at risk. This is why we have focused so heavily on prevention as the number one tool to protect against fraud and chargebacks. We have seen many merchants with previously low, compliant fraud and chargeback ratios experience a sharp increase in fraud and chargeback ratios under the new program, even ratios that have doubled.
We will continue to emphasize the importance of preventative measures to help protect the client before disaster strikes and acquirers and their merchants are at risk of additional fees and fines for non-compliance.
