The AI threat is already within banks
South-east Asia’s lenders have handed credit, fraud and compliance decisions to autonomous technology
THE credit card’s activity looked normal: a S$4 coffee, a purchase on an e-commerce platform, a small digital subscription. None triggered the bank’s fraud detection – because they were not meant to.
And overnight, the same card made one transfer of nearly S$50,000. The cardholder slept through it.
The instructive part in this hypothetical scenario is what those first three transactions actually were. They were not made by the legitimate cardholder; instead, they were low-value tests quietly executed by attackers as training data.