Piotr Kozłowski, Head of Payments and Fraud Prevention at G2A.COM, shares how fraud impacts ecommerce in the context of agentic AI and account-to-account (A2A) payments.
Local payment methods, especially instant options, are must-haves for merchants, but so is fraud prevention. What threats come with these payments, especially for digital entertainment marketplaces, and what is the biggest challenge in fighting them?
Agent-to-agent A2A payments offer a high level of security, but like any payment method, they are not immune to fraud. As agent-to-agent A2A payments become more widely adopted, the primary fraud risk is moving away from compromised payment credentials to buyer manipulation.
Fraudsters nowadays increasingly rely on authorised push payment (APP) fraud, using phishing, social engineering, fake customer support, or account takeover (ATO) to convince buyers to approve the transactions themselves. From a bank perspective, these payments appear legitimate because the customer has successfully authenticated and authorised them. The challenging aspect is that the authorisation is obtained through deception and not genuine intent.
For digital entertainment marketplaces, instant payments combined with immediate access to digital offers leave very limited time to detect and stop possible fraudulent transactions. Once access has been granted, recovering the transaction or limiting its impact is significantly more difficult. The biggest challenge is preserving a seamless payment experience while identifying increasingly sophisticated fraud in real time. Achieving this requires behavioural analytics, risk-based authentication, and localised fraud models, as fraud patterns vary significantly across payment methods and markets.
At G2A.COM, we focus on minimising fraud without introducing unnecessary friction for legitimate users. We combine real-time risk assessment, behavioural analytics, and market-specific fraud controls to detect suspicious activity early, and continuously optimise the payment experience across different payment methods and regions.
How are fraudsters trying to bypass A2A payments security measures, and how can ecommerce players best prepare and stop these attacks?
As agent-to-agent A2A payments gain wider adoption, the biggest challenge won’t be protecting payment credentials alone but identifying when a legitimate transaction has been deceptively authorised.
In practice, fraudsters rarely attack the payment infrastructure. Instead, they target people through AI-powered phishing, impersonation, and social engineering, aiming to convince customers to authorise payments. Addressing this means assessing risk before the payment happens by combining AI-powered risk detection with the expertise of anti-fraud specialists who continuously monitor emerging threats, analyse evolving fraud patterns, and adapt our defences in real time. However, technology alone won’t be enough.
As agent-to-agent payments become more common, user awareness will become just as important as payment security. Businesses will need to invest both in advanced fraud prevention capabilities and education. At G2A, we continuously educate both our marketplace users and our own teams because we believe an informed user is one of the strongest defences against fraud attempts. This belief also underpins our broader ‘Trust in Digital Commerce’ philosophy, through which we advocate greater awareness and shared responsibility across the digital commerce ecosystem.
How do you employ AI in your fraud prevention and cybersecurity strategy, and what do you think A2A payment and tech providers need to do more to help in this fight?
Fraud prevention and its progress will be defined by more than AI. The quality of data, the ability to learn continuously, legal standards, as well as the industry’s willingness to work together – all these aspects matter.
At G2A, AI and machine learning (ML) help us analyse thousands of signals across transactions, user behaviour, and marketplace activity in real time. This enables us to detect possible emerging fraud patterns faster, support more informed risk decisions, and continuously improve our detection models based on real-world investigations. What makes this particularly effective is the breadth of context a digital marketplace can provide, extending well beyond payments.
Today, every organisation sees only part of the fraud landscape:
- banks see payment activity;
- merchants understand customer behaviour;
- marketplaces have visibility across the entire user journey;
- fraud prevention partners contribute global threat intelligence.
Individually, each perspective is incomplete, but when combined, they create a much stronger foundation for detecting and preventing fraud. From our perspective, the real opportunity lies in connecting those insights more effectively.
AI becomes significantly more powerful when it’s supported by diverse, high-quality signals rather than operating within isolated data sets.
Next, the industry should build better AI agent models and simplify the approach to combining intelligence across the payments ecosystem in a secure, privacy-conscious way. That’s where I believe the greatest progress in fraud prevention will come from.
This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Account-to-Account Payments Report 2026, which features insights into global trends, technologies, partnerships, and the next phase of the A2A evolution. Access the full report to understand where the A2A payments ecosystem stands today and what’s next.
About the author
Piotr Kozłowski is Head of Payments and Fraud Prevention at G2A.COM, and a global payments expert with an MBA degree from an international programme, supported by operations and finance knowledge, and vast ecommerce experience. His professional experience is built on leading and participating in projects with banks and financial institutions, OTAs and airlines (FRU.PL & LOT), and blockchain (Electric Vault). Previously held positions include Product Manager, Head of Payments and Treasury, and Chief Growth Officer. He managed teams of 5 to 25 people with different scopes of duties, seniority, and areas of responsibility in structured (corporates) and semi-structured organisations (startups).
About G2A.COM
G2A.COM is the world's largest and most trusted marketplace for digital entertainment, where more than 35 million people from 180 countries have purchased over 150 million items. Users can choose from more than 125,000 digital offerings, including games, DLCs, and in-game items, as well as non-gaming items such as gift cards, subscriptions, software, and e-learning, sold by sellers worldwide. G2A.COM leads in online security, awarded the prestigious American CNP award for the Best Merchant Team of the Year in Anti-fraud and Cybersecurity, alongside companies such as Microsoft, Barclays Bank, and First Data.
