Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Thursday of Mysteries, 2nd April 2026

Oh, sweet suffering Jesus on a blockchain, here we go again with the latest sermon from the Church of AI Salvation.

Bunty Bower,  that internationally bestselling author, keynote speaker, futurist, and professional tomorrow-peddler,  has once more floated down from the LinkedIn heavens to bless us with his wisdom: fraud doesn’t just pop up like a surprise erection at the exact moment someone taps “pay.” No, no, no. It leaves clues, darling. Hidden signals. Whispered portents. Like a conspiracy theorist who’s discovered the radical concept of “things happen before other things.”

For years, apparently, we’ve been doing fraud prevention like cavemen: “Me see bad transaction. Me block.” How adorably analogue. How tragically pre-AI. But fear not, peasants, because in this glorious year of our Lord 2026, the solution has arrived, wrapped in more buzzwords than a Silicon Valley TED Talk: Threat Intelligence™ powered by glorious, all-seeing, all-knowing Artificial Intelligence.

Because nothing fixes systemic greed, incompetence, and the fact that half the internet is held together by duct tape and prayer quite like throwing another layer of half-baked machine learning at it.

Let’s pause and admire the sheer audacity. These AI grifters have spent the last decade screaming that if we just collect more data, build bigger lakes, meshier meshes, fabricier fabrics, sprinkle some neural pixie dust, and call it “intelligence,” then, finally, finally, fraud will cower in fear before our predictive algorithms. Instead, what did we get?

We got alert fatigue so severe that analysts now treat real fraud the same way they treat their mother’s WhatsApp forwards: ignored until it’s too late. We got dashboards that look like an acid trip in a server farm. We got “AI-powered” systems that confidently flag your nan buying Werther’s Originals as high-risk money laundering while letting Nigerian princes drain pension funds in peace. And every time it fails, the answer is never “maybe we should stop hoovering up every scrap of human behaviour like digital crack addicts.” No. The answer is always “more AI. Better AI. AI with threat intelligence this time. Trust us, bro.”

The cynicism is Olympic-level. They talk about “connecting cyber risk to fraud outcomes” as if they’ve invented cause and effect, not as if they’re just admitting that their previous AI was too stupid to notice the house was on fire until the money was already gone. “Earlier signals,” they coo. “The full attack lifecycle.” Mate, the full attack lifecycle usually starts with some marketing wanker demanding “frictionless checkout” and ends with customer service telling victims “our AI is very sorry for your loss.”

And then,  peak comedy,  in struts Mastercard like a benevolent uncle who just happens to own the only fire extinguisher in a burning orphanage. “We see everything across the payment ecosystem,” they whisper seductively. Yes, and they’ll sell you access to that god-like visibility for a small fee. A modest fee. A “please sign here and sell your soul” fee. Because nothing says “we’re protecting you” like a company whose entire business model depends on transactions happening at scale, now charging extra to tell you when the criminals they helped enable are particularly active today.

This is the AI grift in its purest form: create the problem with reckless data practices and surveillance capitalism, then sell the “solution” which is just more of the same expensive, opaque, unaccountable black box that failed last quarter. “Our AI filters the noise,” they claim.

Sure it does. It filters it straight into a quarterly report that says “we blocked 0.0003% more fraud than last year, please renew the contract.”

The masterpiece of the con is how they make it sound revolutionary. “Threat intelligence changes the equation!” No, Bernard. What changes the equation is basic competence, not feeding more data into the great glittering AI sausage machine so it can shit out slightly more confident nonsense. But that wouldn’t get you on stage at expensive conferences. That wouldn’t shift consulting hours or enterprise licenses. That wouldn’t let the entire analytics industry keep pretending they’re geniuses instead of glorified spreadsheet fetishists with god complexes.

So yes, dear corporations, rush out and buy Mastercard’s Threat Intelligence AI™. Integrate it with your Data Mesh™. Feed it into your Analytics Platform™. Let the machines achieve connected intelligence while your actual humans burn out and your customers suffer identity theft.

Because in the end, that’s the real joke, isn’t it? The AI isn’t here to stop fraud. It’s here to launder incompetence. To make it look like you’re doing something profound when really you’re just paying protection money to the same digital mafia that profits from the chaos.

The criminals are thriving. The grifters are thriving. The only people not thriving are the poor bastards whose data keeps getting weaponised against them while being told it’s all for their own good.

Brilliant. Revolutionary.

Ten out of ten. No notes.

Just more AI bullshit, served with extra sarcasm and a side of existential despair. Bon appétit.