Falkin Fights to Foil Financial Fraud
By John San Filippo
A devastating scam targeting someone close to home became the catalyst for member-facing scam defense fintech Falkin.
A Personal Wake-Up Call
A little over two years ago, the team behind Falkin watched scam campaigns hit their own circle. “My co-founder’s mother received a text message that she thought was from her bank,” recalled Joel Frisch, Co-Founder and COO of the London-based Falkin, “instructing her that there were some issues on her account, and she needed to take action, click a link, call a number. She followed the instructions, and that afternoon, they liquidated her net worth.”
The emotional and financial fallout sparked an immediate reassessment.
“It caused one of those real career timeouts, like, whoa, what is going on here?” Frisch said. “How many people are affected by this? How big is this problem? What’s going on right now? Why are current technologies, current approaches not stopping this?”
Shifting Defense to the Left
While Falkin’s founders previously built cross-border money movement and lending platforms, the incident revealed a gaping hole in conventional security. Most financial institution defenses center on internal networks or backend transaction monitoring. According to Frisch, by the time an unauthorized wire or transfer is underway, the damage is already nearly impossible to reverse.
“What we realized was that as AI is accelerating deception, it’s actually attacking consumers earlier,” Frisch explained. “And it’s this concept of shift left which we are big proponents of. If you wait until ‘Uncle Joe’ is making a transaction, and you’re trying to determine whether that transaction is safe, it’s too late. The reality is, is that Uncle Joe has received that message, that urgent payment request, that appetizing advertisement to buy whatever he’s looking to buy half off on social media, or being offered incredible returns on a new investment opportunity way earlier than before the credit union gets engaged.”
Because credit unions remain the first place panicked members turn when compromised, Frisch argued that safety tools must be integrated directly into their everyday member experience.
“When that consumer finds themselves in trouble, the first place they turn is their credit union,” Frisch noted. “The credit union should be the one that’s bringing that safety to them.”
Bringing Scam Defense to Member Devices
Falkin, Frisch further explained, was engineered as an embedded, white-labeled solution that credit unions can roll out across web, mobile apps, and browser extensions without touching core banking systems or sensitive customer account data.
Members can utilize on-demand safety checkers by pasting suspicious text messages, invoice PDFs, or online deals directly into the tool or forwarding them to dedicated SMS hotlines to receive instant risk assessments. Falkin also offers a persistent “shield” capability that members can opt into.
“Once you do that, it lives in your phone, and anytime you are clicking on links, visiting websites, receiving messages if they are flagged as risky, which checks in real time, it’ll block you from engaging with that,” Frisch said. “And that’s really the ultimate goal of turning the credit union into the home security system, the ADT of the digital world.”
Turning Winnings into Member Protection
Falkin won the pitch contest, which came with a $20,000 grant, at the recent Reseda Summit in Detroit. In true credit union spirit, the company is looking to recycle the grant back into the credit union ecosystem to lower adoption barriers for smaller community institutions.
“We would love to take [the prize money] and turn it around and offer it as a scholarship for credit unions to use for Falkin safety technology,” Frisch said. “Because that’s more valuable for the communities, and frankly, it’s more valuable for us as a brand.”
He added, “If there are credit unions who are looking to reduce the impact that scams have on their members and their community, and they want to start introducing member-facing scam prevention tools, let’s let them pilot our tools, and then if they want to use them on a long-term basis, let’s use that grant money towards the cost of the technology for them.”
