Why employees of fintech Stripe "lurk in the internet’s sketchier chat groups"
Stripe may be reaping the benefits of its investments in AI, but there are some areas where the payments fintech is taking a more human approach, too. In Stripe's 2025 annual letter, founders John and Patrick Collison describe one of its unusual methods for combatting fraud.
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The Collisons say fraud is an "adversarial business" in which fraudsters are always refining their methods. This can be a problem when working with LLMs, which "mostly deal with knowledge that changes slowly."
Stripe still uses them, but the Collisons say Stripe "enable[s] models to adapt in real time," and that their models have access to data from as recent as 100 milliseconds from the present.
The tech might still struggle when combatting new, emerging threats. In those instances, Stripe also has counterintelligence teams. Social media is one of the key areas where fraudsters gather information, and the Collisons say those teams "lurk in the internet’s sketchier chat groups to proactively discover compromised credentials and ensure they’re flagged by Stripe," as well as other methods.
Stripe's head of financial crime investigations, Brett Stees, is a 14-year alum of HSBC and the bank's former head of major investigations. Other counterintelligence professionals employed by the firm include Amazon alums and ex-US Air Force special agents.
Their efforts seem to be bearing fruit. Stripe says "illicit attempts to identify valid card credentials" have fallen almost 80% in the last two years.
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