The federal government’s bet on using artificial intelligence to fight financial crime appears to be paying off. Machine learning AI helped the US Treasury Department to sift through massive amounts of data and recover $1 billion worth of check fraud in fiscal 2024 alone, according to new estimates shared first with CNN. That’s nearly triple what the Treasury recovered in the prior fiscal year. “It’s really been transformative,” Renata Miskell, a top Treasury official, told CNN in a phone interview. “Leveraging data has upped our game in fraud detection and prevention,” Miskell said. The Treasury Department credited AI with helping officials prevent and recover more than $4 billion worth of fraud overall in fiscal 2024, a six-fold spike from the year before. US officials quietly started using AI to detect financial crime in late 2022, taking a page out of what many banks and credit card companies already do to stop bad guys. The goal is to protect taxpayer money against fraud, which spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic as the federal government scrambled to disburse emergency aid to consumers and businesses. To be sure, Treasury is not using generative AI, the kind that has captivated users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini by generating images, crafting song lyrics and answering complex questions (even though it still sometimes struggles with simple queries). Instead, the fraud detection efforts rely on machine learning, the subset of AI that excels at analyzing vast amounts of data, and making decisions and predictions based on what it’s learned. AI can be very helpful in fighting financial crime by combing can through almost endless streams of data and detecting subtle patterns – all in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do it. Experts say that once sophisticated AI models are trained, they can sniff out suspicious transactions in mere milliseconds.

Full report : United States Treasury Department uses artificial intelligence to catch cyber criminals involved in financial frauds.