Learn how abuse works, and what it costs

Michael Rasile, touring drummer turned fan-experience leader at Front Row and partner at Ceremony of Roses, joins Arthi and Jayan to talk about what really happens inside the war room when a major artist drop goes live. He walks through the Harry Styles drop that "looked like a roulette machine," the trade-off between blocking freight forwarders and protecting Billboard chart eligibility, why the line between a super-fan and a fraudster is razor-thin, and the under-discussed rise in chargeback abuse he believes is being fueled by AI cynicism toward the internet.

When is fraud really abuse, and when is abuse just a customer taking advantage of a policy you left open? In our latest In a Pinch episode, Mike Vergara (veteran risk leader across RSA, PayPal, Blackhawk, and now Trustly) makes the case for a product-first approach to risk, unpacks the rise of first-party abuse, and shares the origin story of "human-in-the-loop" at PayPal a decade before the term existed. A must-listen for anyone building in fraud, risk, product, or fintech.

We sit down with Philipp, CTO of Lux Experience, the parent company behind iconic luxury fashion retailers Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter, and Mr. Porter. Philipp shares his journey from building neural networks for payment fraud detection in 2004 to running technology for one of the world's largest luxury e-commerce operations. The conversation dives deep into the unique fraud challenges of high-end retail (including a wild fake FedEx truck heist).