Fraud. AI. Trust.
And what happens before the moment of loss.
Raquel Schwarcz speaks on the changing nature of fraud, AI-enabled deception, manipulated intent, trust intelligence and the operational risks that emerge as machines become more persuasive, autonomous and difficult to distinguish from humans.
Drawing on more than two decades across investigations, corporate risk, global payments and fraud leadership, Raquel brings a practitioner’s perspective to one of the most important questions facing organizations today:
How do we recognize risk early enough to change the outcome?
Fraud doesn’t start
with the transaction.
Most fraud controls become strongest near the point of action: the transaction, account change, payment request or transfer.
But by then, the decision may already have been shaped by days, weeks or months of trust-building, manipulation, pressure or synthetic influence.
Raquel’s work focuses on what happens upstream — where trust is created, intent changes and weak signals begin forming a trajectory toward harm.
That perspective underpins Project EMBER and EmberTrace, SPEmet’s work on pre-extraction trajectory intelligence.
A relationship, influence pathway or adversarial interaction begins.
Credibility, familiarity, dependency or perceived authority develops.
Pressure, isolation, urgency, persuasion or engineered influence intensifies.
Behaviour begins moving toward a consequential financial or access-related action.
Money, credentials, access or another objective is requested or transferred.
Move meaningful detection upward in the trajectory — from the transaction toward the developing pattern of manipulation that precedes it.
Authorized But Manipulated
A customer can be correctly authenticated. The account can genuinely belong to them. The payment can be knowingly authorized. And the decision can still have been manipulated.
This keynote explores how AI, social engineering and increasingly convincing digital identities are changing the meaning of authorization — and why fraud teams must begin looking beyond isolated transactions toward the trajectory that produced them.
Audiences leave with:
Five conversations shaping the next generation of risk.
Keynotes and executive sessions can be adapted for leadership, fraud, payments, technology, trust and AI governance audiences.
When Anything Can Look Real
Building trust in an age when voice, image, video and conversation can increasingly be synthetic.
The Trajectory
Before the Transaction
Detecting fraud while there is still time to intervene — before the transaction becomes the first reliable signal.
AI Changes What Can Go Wrong
Building and governing AI in high-risk environments where permissions, judgment and accountability matter.
Don’t Train Humans to Spot the Fake
Designing systems that remain resilient when synthetic content becomes indistinguishable from authentic content.
From Authentication
to Decision Integrity
Why proving identity may no longer be enough when genuine customers can still act under manipulation.
A practitioner’s perspective — not theory from the sidelines.
Raquel Schwarcz has spent more than two decades working across investigations, corporate risk, payments and fraud. Most recently, she led global buyer-risk programs at Amazon. Today she is Founder of SPEmet and creator of EmberTrace, where her work focuses on AI-era fraud, manipulated intent, pre-extraction trajectory intelligence and the changing architecture of trust.
& risk
environments
to AI-enabled intelligence
Bring a different fraud conversation to the room.
Raquel speaks to organizations and audiences looking beyond conventional fraud detection toward the emerging questions of AI, manipulated intent, trust and decision integrity.
Fraud · AI Risk · Trust Intelligence