Artificial intelligence has become a catalyst for global expansion, powering automation, customer experience optimization, and revenue acceleration across markets. But as enterprises embrace AI to scale, fraudsters are using the same technology to bypass traditional defenses, creating an asymmetry that static, rule-based fraud tools simply can’t keep up with.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Brazil. With massive transaction volume, high digital engagement, and a constantly evolving fraud ecosystem, a sophisticated AI-driven attack can inflict damage long before legacy systems detect anything unusual. Tactics like generative-AI-crafted synthetic identities and automated card testing demonstrate just how quickly the threat landscape is advancing.
This is why fraud prevention itself has shifted from a rules-versus-fraud problem to an AI-versus-AI problem. And businesses are recognizing that change. According to the 2025 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report, 63% of merchants foresee an increase in their fraud-prevention investment over the next two years. However, many also cite a growing challenge: ensuring the accuracy and reliability of their AI-based fraud models.
For global companies entering or expanding in Brazil, effective AI-powered fraud prevention isn’t a competitive advantage but a foundational requirement. Only adaptive, behavior-driven systems can keep pace with attackers operating at machine speed.
In this article, we’ll examine how AI is reshaping fraud in Brazil—from synthetic identities to automated wallet abuse—and why merchants need defenses engineered for this new reality. The goal is simple: to equip cross-border businesses with a clear, actionable view of how to protect growth in one of the world’s most dynamic digital markets.
How Generative AI Is Powering a New Wave of Fraud in Brazil
Fraud in Brazil has always operated under a unique logic, shaped by local digital behavior, data availability, and patterns that differ sharply from those seen in the U.S. or Europe (2025 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report). But in recent years, fraudsters have gained access to more advanced automation and AI-assisted tools, enabling them to scale attacks and mimic legitimate customers with increasing sophistication.
The result is a fraud landscape where some of the biggest threats come from the transactional layer. Fraudsters assemble synthetic identities using fragments of real Brazilian data, automate parts of the checkout journey with bots and scripts, and test combinations of CPF, phone numbers, emails, and devices until they find patterns that bypass rigid, rules-based systems.
Common patterns include:
- Highly adaptive behavioral flows that mimic natural shopper navigation, interaction rhythms, and even human-like typing patterns, making automated activity difficult to distinguish from that of real users.
- AI-assisted automation that adjusts in real time, varying timing, pacing, and sequences to avoid looking like scripts or bots, and continuously learning from failed attempts.
- Synthetic identities that blend real and fabricated CPF, contact, and address data so convincingly that each component appears legitimate, creating profiles that pass traditional verification with ease.
- Sophisticated device and network obfuscation, with AI dynamically rotating device fingerprints, emulators, VPN routes, and geolocation data to appear as genuine, unique shoppers spread across diverse regions.
Unfortunately, these patterns are difficult for traditional tools to detect, because they rely too heavily on discrete data checks and static rules.
As fraudsters continue to automate and coordinate their methods, merchants operating in Brazil need solutions capable of understanding how legitimate shoppers actually behave, and identifying when something falls outside that behavioral signature.
AI vs. AI: How PagShield® Protects Payments
Fraudsters now use generative AI to scale attacks that look statistically legitimate, automate thousands of attempts at once, and stitch together synthetic identities convincing enough to slip past static, rule-based systems. The threat is faster, more adaptive, and more coherent than anything the market faced even a year ago. To defend against AI-powered fraud, merchants selling in Brazil need antifraud intelligence that evolves just as quickly.
PagShield® is that defense—an AI-driven solution built to outthink, outlearn, and outpace modern fraud.
Unlike global tools built around static rules or heavy device fingerprinting, PagShield® is a transactional AI designed specifically for Brazil’s e-commerce reality. At its core is a self-evolving learning algorithm that continuously retrains itself as new behaviors, fraud patterns, and shopping rhythms emerge. This allows PagShield® to evaluate the behavioral coherence of every transaction—an approach far more resilient against the new generation of automated, AI-powered attacks.
The sections below break down how it works in practice.
Learns the Patterns of Real Brazilian Consumers
PagShield® learns the authentic behavioral signature of each merchant’s legitimate shoppers. Over time, it develops a multi-dimensional understanding of what “real” looks like, including:
- Common combinations of CPF, email, card, phone, and address
- Typical ticket sizes, purchase hours, and regional patterns
- How often the same customer returns
- What a natural, human shopping rhythm feels like
This is the foundation fraudsters can’t replicate.
Even when a fraud attempt uses real data or well-crafted synthetic profiles, the relationships between those data points rarely mirror the organic patterns of a true Brazilian shopper.
Detects What Synthetic Identities Can’t Fake
AI-generated or automated attacks break down when viewed through this behavioral lens. PagShield® detects inconsistencies such as:
- Emails that don’t align logically with associated phone numbers or CPF
- Addresses outside expected geographic or socioeconomic patterns
- Repetition of key entities across multiple attempts
- Transaction speeds or rhythms that suggest automation
- Clusters of attempts sharing hidden statistical similarities
Our solution doesn’t flag these anomalies because one field looks suspicious, but because the overall pattern behaves unlike a legitimate consumer of that store. Fraudulent entities may be individually convincing, but when analyzed collectively by PagShield®, they become incoherent.
Evaluates Checkout Behavior Without Device Fingerprinting
While synthetic identity analysis focuses on who the buyer appears to be, PagShield® also evaluates how the buyer behaves across the checkout journey.
Even sophisticated automation reveals itself in:
- Velocity spikes: rapid-fire attempts or repeated use of cards, emails, or CPFs
- Timing irregularities: sequences too fast, too uniform, or statistically improbable
- Flow inconsistencies: navigation behaviors that don’t match real shoppers’ browsing or typing rhythms
- Artificial clustering: multiple attempts sharing hidden behavioral patterns indicative of scripts or bots
- Patterned repetition: recurring structures that no human user would replicate naturally
Because PagShield® analyzes behavioral structure rather than device signals, it remains resilient even when attackers spoof fingerprints, rotate IPs, or emulate browsers. This makes it a fundamentally stronger defense against AI-driven, automated fraud campaigns.
Digital Wallets: An Extra Layer of Protection
As AI-powered fraud accelerates, merchants operating in Brazil need more than a single line of defense. Behavioral AI, anomaly detection, and transactional intelligence form a crucial part of this strategy, but so do digital wallets, which provide an additional, highly effective security layer outside the AI arms race.
Wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay introduce strong, device-native protections that dramatically reduce exposure to stolen card data, password compromise, and unauthorized use. Their tokenization frameworks replace sensitive card numbers with single-use tokens, while biometric authentication ensures that only the legitimate device owner can initiate a transaction.
But when processing payments in Brazil, it’s crucial to understand that digital wallets do not protect merchants equally, and this has direct implications for whether PagShield® needs to step in.
Apple Pay: High Security with a Liability Shift
Apple Pay combines Secure Element technology with biometric authentication (Face ID or Touch ID) to create one of the strongest links between a cardholder and a device in the industry. In Brazil, this architecture typically results in a liability shift: If a fraudulent Apple Pay transaction occurs, the issuer—not the merchant—absorbs the loss.
Because Apple Pay already provides biometric authentication and issuer-backed liability protection, PagShield® does not apply to Apple Pay transactions, avoiding unnecessary antifraud charges. The transaction is inherently low risk for the merchant.
Google Pay: tokenized and secure but still merchant-exposed
Google Pay also uses tokenization and device protections, but the liability shift generally does not extend to merchants, meaning that even tokenized Google Pay transactions can still lead to chargebacks.
And with fraudsters now using AI to simulate legitimate wallet behavior, this gap becomes significant. That’s why PagShield® remains fully active and essential for Google Pay transactions in Brazil.
In short, digital wallets are a powerful foundation, and PagShield® ensures that foundation holds even when fraudsters bring AI into the equation.
Intelligent Fraud Prevention with PagBrasil
AI has fundamentally changed the economics of fraud in Brazil. Attacks are faster, more scalable, more adaptive, and increasingly able to mimic the surface-level behavior of real consumers.
To protect revenue in Brazil, you need a defense strategy that evolves as quickly as the threats themselves—one grounded in local behavioral intelligence, transactional AI, and an understanding of how Brazilian consumers actually shop.
That’s exactly what PagBrasil delivers.
Don’t let AI-driven fraud drain your revenue in Brazil. Talk to our specialists today and make sure your business is protected.
