In professional circles, we often talk about the fact that we didn’t learn about fraud prevention in school. It’s not a subject where colleges offer an undergraduate or master’s degree. Many of us end up falling into this industry by chance, learning on the job and from other fraud professionals.
There’s a lot you can learn this way, but it’s also finite, because there are threats, regulations, and tactics that may not be immediately relevant to you. Working in fraud and risk prevention forces you to constantly engage in a game of cat and mouse, where the targets and tactics are always evolving. Even just over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of AI-generated credential stuffing scripts, synthetic identities, and the growth of first-party fraud, fueled by social media.
What I’ve learned through my own personal career growth and managing teams is that the only way to stay ahead is through constant upskilling and continuing education.
Getting Started without Overhauling Your Schedule
Admittedly, we often deprioritize continuing education from our to-do lists; fraud teams are perpetually understaffed and it’s easy to say that you’ll dedicate the time to learning once your caseload eases up. But as anyone in the industry can attest to, that moment never arrives.
The best way I’ve found to dedicate time for continuing education is to treat it like a habit rather than a project. Like fitness or reading, setting aside one hour a week gives you more benefits than dedicating no time at all.
Maybe you build up the habit by starting small. You probably already receive free industry newsletters and publications in your inbox. Pick two or three and then take 10-15 minutes per day to actually read them, or spend 30 minutes a week attending a new webinar, with an additional 15 minutes afterwards thinking about how to apply those learnings to your own work.
On a similar note, dedicate time specifically to building a peer network with other practitioners. This can be through informal Slack and LinkedIn groups, or in person at industry conferences. It’s one of those things where you get more out of it the more you put into it.
Where to Focus Learning
Continuing education pays off most when you know which skills you want to hone. Fraud prevention touches nearly every part of a business, so the skill set is broad. In my experience, these areas are especially important to keep up with:
- Data and analytics: Machine learning and AI are changing how teams detect risk and make decisions. You don’t need to become a data scientist, but keeping up with what these tools can and can’t do helps you use them well and ask better questions of your vendors and data teams.
- The threat landscape: Schemes like synthetic identity fraud and account takeover keep evolving. Following how attacks start and spread–, and how fraudster tactics are changing–, helps you anticipate what’s coming instead of reacting after losses pile up.
- Detection and response: Detection techniques and dispute processes evolve alongside fraud, and card network rules around chargebacks change regularly. Keeping up with those changes helps you evaluate if your current approach still fits the risks your business faces.
- Vendor and fee literacy: Card networks update their fees and programs regularly, and vendor relationships and contracts change as your business grows. Staying current helps you hold vendors accountable and catch cost increases before they add up.
- Product and customer experience: New features and payment methods can bring new risk. Fraud professionals who keep learning how products are built can shape controls early and protect the customer experience while avoiding friction.
- Storytelling and communication: Data and threat knowledge only goes so far if you can’t clearly communicate risks and persuade leadership to act. Building your skills in how you frame and convey your findings in terms that leadership can understand matters significantly when you need executive buy-in to support what your team needs.
If you decide that you’re ready for a more structured program, there are curricula like Sift’s Trust Academy, which includes different modules and quizzes to test your understanding of different fraud trends and concepts. This can be a great starting point before pursuing a more intensive certification like the Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE), Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) or Certified Financial Crime Specialist (CFCS).
How Ongoing Education Makes You Better at Your Job
When I think about how continuing education has benefitted my own career, it shows up as:
- The ability to recognize emerging schemes faster: You can spot patterns in fraud attempts you see every day, but meeting peers and reading the latest industry briefings can help you find blind spots.
- Fewer false positives, which protects customer experience: Blocking legitimate customers has a cost, even though it rarely appears on a loss report. But by learning about what does (and doesn’t) work from others, you can write tighter rules, set smarter thresholds, and discern where a control creates friction without reducing risk.
- Stronger regulatory footing: Not only do policies and protocols change, but they can also vary by geography. Continuing education allows you to stay up-to-date on the policies that matter, translating often complex and confusing rules to your own company. This is especially important if you work in a highly regulated industry like iGaming or fintech, but is also relevant to any merchant, since credit card and money transfer policies can influence fraud operations, too.
- A stronger ability to quantify impact and articulate a fraud and risk team’s value to company leadership: The best way to gain more resources for your team is to learn how to translate fraud work into business impact, like revenue preserved and losses avoided. Continuing education gives you the vocabulary and frameworks to communicate that.
Especially for analysts who want to move into a leadership role, investing in your own development is one of the easiest ways to show your value.
Treating continuing education as part of the job rather than a “nice to have” can pay dividends long-term. It can open up your career to new opportunities and industries, boost your earning potential, and make you a more well-rounded fraud and risk professional. Continuing education can take many different forms, so it’s about finding the right types of learning opportunities that will benefit you in your current and future career.
Learn more and continue your fraud education with Sift’s Trust Academy.
