Block: Digital Payment Scams Have a Surprisingly Youthful Face

Watch more: Digital Shift: Block’s Brian Boates

Across the double-edged sword of technology, it’s fraud that can cut businesses the sharpest.

The digital payments revolution has delivered speed, convenience and new pathways for financial empowerment. But it has also accelerated the pace and sophistication of criminal opportunity.

“Scammers have evolved and they take new shapes and forms every year. And with the rise of AI … it’s evolving even faster,” Brian Boates, chief risk officer at Block, told PYMNTS. “These scams are getting much more sophisticated and a lot harder to spot as a consumer.”

Today’s scam economy no longer resembles the era of spam faxes, phishing emails and improbable foreign royalty. It has evolved into a distributed, artificial intelligence-enabled deception ecosystem capable of mimicking trusted institutions, hijacking personal identities and weaponizing real-time payments.

“This is not just a back-office issue … it’s part of how our customers experience our application,” Boates said, stressing that fraud prevention has evolved from a defensive cost center into a strategic trust asset.

One of the driving reasons? The changing demographics of the fraud victim landscape.

For decades, fraud prevention strategies were anchored around an overarching demographic stereotype: the vulnerable retiree. The shifting data now invalidates that model. Young, mobile-centric users are not only the most active participants in digital commerce but also the most reachable through the channels where scams proliferate, like social media, messaging apps and online marketplaces.

“It’s not what people think of in the back of their minds traditionally of who might be most likely to fall victim … it’s those younger generations that are spending more of their time online,” Boates said. “We have to evolve our tactics and understand where the scams are originating, and consider that in the solutions that we’re putting out there.”

As fraudsters adopt the language, timing, tone and digital footprint of trust, user perception must harden to match, with financial literacy maturing to increasingly include digital situational awareness, threat modeling and identity skepticism.

According to a new PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Financial Scams and Consumer Trust,” commissioned by Block, over 8 in 10 successful scams (81%) involve impersonation, whether of a major financial institution, tech brand, or even a close personal contact. Artificial intelligence expands that playbook exponentially by synthesizing voice, image and writing patterns into highly credible false identities.

“Tools are making it easy to impersonate brands online, easy to impersonate the voice of known friends and family,” Boates said. “It’s getting really, really sophisticated.”

In response, Block itself has begun embedding trust signals directly into its user experience. When a Cash App user engages with a new or unfamiliar counterparty, the platform surfaces contextual indicators such as shared network connections or previous transaction history. Identity must be triangulated from behavior and not simply presented through static credentials.

One of the digital economy’s greatest breakthroughs, real-time payments, has also exposed a soft underbelly. According to the same report, two-thirds of victims send funds to scammers within 24 hours of initial contact, and a third within only 30 minutes.

Urgency is becoming a feature, not a flaw, in the scammer’s script. This creates a design paradox: how to add protective friction without compromising the value proposition of instant payment platforms.

“We don’t want to put a warning on every single payment for every customer all of the time … people get numb to that,” Boates said. “How do you create that really precise in-the-moment warning to give the customer that moment to reflect and think?”

For its own part, Block relies on precise, machine-learning powered risk signals that generate targeted, moment-specific alerts. This nuance marks a departure from legacy fraud controls, which tended to focus on blocking transactions post-incident rather than influencing user behavior mid-decision.

Boates acknowledged that the fight is long and the vectors are multiplying. Industry collaboration remains insufficient, especially with telecom and social platforms where scam pathways originate.

“The more that we can share knowledge, share information, work together, the better we’re all going to be,” he said.

After all, the report highlighted that 25% of scam victims never report their loss, often due to confusion about process, shame, or the belief that recovery is impossible. This not only harms individuals but also blinds the system to trend intelligence.

“What we try to do and what we’ve built in Cash App is a really intuitive and simple scam reporting flow … it all happens in the app,” Boates said. “To date we’ve refunded over 80,000 customers more than $8 million … making a really big difference.”

The next frontier in payments may not be defined by speed alone, but by safety as a feature, education as a product and trust as a differentiator. In that future, FinTech platforms could be judged not by how fast they move money, but how fiercely they protect it.

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