Noam Izaki on Synthetic Merchants: The Next Big Threat in Fintech?

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of the B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast. And today we have a guest on the show, Noam Izaki. I hope I didn't butcher his name too bad, from Ballerine. And we're going to discuss today the synthetic merchant. Now this is a podcast If you're an agent in the merchant service industry and you're getting leads through the internet, this is for you. If you're an ISO and you're dealing with agents and direct leads, this is for you. If you're a business owner, this is actually even more for you because this goes very deep into people stealing people's actual identities, and we're going to be talking about the synthetic merchant economy and with Noam today. So Noam, introduce yourself to the audience.

Awesome. Thanks for having me on, Allen. Great to be here. And we are working— I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ballerine. We are working with card schemes, merchant acquirers, PSPs, and we help them to automate merchant onboarding and monitoring. What we do quite differently is that we developed AI agents that operate just as your best underwriters, AML, fraud professional would, but they do it at the speed of a machine and maintain this investigative mindset when checking those merchants at scale. So great to be here and I'm excited to explore this topic with you.

Yes, I'm going to tell you about it, you know, some of the scams that we've been seeing. One thing is I tell everybody on my podcast whenever we're discussing about finances or whatever, you're a business owner, you need to make sure you're signed up for Credit Karma or whatever other Equifax free protection for your, you know, Social Security number, because your Social Security number is everything when it comes to your personal life and even more important for your business. And if your identity is stolen and used by one of these synthetic merchant guys, because that's exactly what's going on. And I'm going to tell a story and we'll listen to how Noam is going to tell us how he would stop this. So the worst one that we got, we didn't— thank goodness none of these people caused any financial damage to our company, our partners, the bank, the processor. We stopped it. We stopped it dead in its tracks. But we had a very sophisticated Chinese scammer, and we know this person was definitely Chinese. And they sent us an application that everything looked real. It all checked out. The person picked up the telephone, called us. They actually stole somebody's identity.

They—

I don't know how they— they stole the person's Google My Business page, took it over, took over their website, took over the phone at the business. They were answering the phone at the business because they got the— they changed the phone number on the actual website. Okay, so they really— they, they did it. And, um, we— they got approved. We sent them a credit card machine. We started to see some really strange pattern of transactions coming through, so we shut the account down. Uh, they didn't get any money. Their bank account was— later we found out it was frozen, and the guy stopped answering the phone. And then a few days later, we went back and checked online. And I guess the business, the actual business owner figured out that somebody hijacked his stuff and somehow he got back control of it.

How?

I don't know how the guy got back control of it. We actually spoke to the actual owner of the business. We tried to get a hold of the Synthetic Signer person, but that person never called us back. And that, that's kind of crazy, but The other pattern we see is, and this one is kind of stupid because we're not going to fall— I'm not going to fall for this one. We get an increased amount of people and filling out our form, and then their websites are all Shopify sites. And then all these businesses are home-based. And then when we ask them about— we'll send them an email like, oh, we need proof of inventory, this and that. And they never pick up the phone. So if you don't pick the phone up, we're done with you. We don't process it. But these Shopify ones, you know, I'm not going to believe that someone's going to pay Shopify extra 2%, right, to process payments outside of Shopify. Doesn't make sense. And we're seeing it, and we're also getting a lot of phone calls from merchants, exist, you know, merchants that are not our clients. Saying that their identities got stolen and they got put on match list, and now they're not— they, they had their credit card processing shut off. And then we have to go through and explain to them how to write to the match list, get the information back, file police reports, you know, uh, contact the FTC. They have to go dispute their credit file. It's— this thing is, this thing is on fire. And I'm sure that there's some companies that— and, and here's another one, and then I'll let you talk. So we warned one guy who was a dentist because we had somebody give us an application of a, uh, restaurant supply house, but the address was a dentist office. We called the guy on the phone. The person, the signer, whatever, the voice did not match the person that was in the picture because it was a Hispanic dentist and whatever. The person did not sound right on the phone. We asked them where the warehouse was. We said there's a dentist office there. They said, oh, it's behind the dentist office. Right. Okay. We're not buying that. And then the dentist got 3 clovers in the mail and he called me up and he goes, after we warned him, he goes, what's the scam? So I said, the scam is they got a clover. That's why they always ask for clover. Then they got access to the virtual terminal. And he later found out that whoever these scammers were ran on one account over $50,000 of credit cards. And he had to get the police, he had to get a lawyer. It's a mess. So this is the kind of stuff that we're seeing happening, and I think people need to monitor your— you got to have your alerts turned on, on, on some kind of app. And if you get an alert saying somebody ran your credit, you need to go do something right away. So tell, how would you guys— this, this are not easily— these are, unless you really look into these applications, they look real.

Yeah, yeah. Look, at the, at the high level, first of all, right, um, those techniques were always there, right? But the access and the cost of doing them. The access was limited and the cost was much higher.

So all those cases that you mentioned, because with AI, the, with AI, these guys can make like a website right away with AI and then make fake documents with AI. And we're getting tons of fake documents from these.

Exactly. Exactly. So today, right? And I'm sure that each one of those applications that you received, right, there were some things that they did really, really well. And maybe hijacking the website, as you mentioned, that's quite impressive, by the way. I'm not seeing this one, like I see the other ones that you mentioned, but maybe they did that very well. But in the documents, in the whole narrative, right, there were problems. But sometimes, you know, in the intense environment where risk operation underwriters live, when they need to meet an SLA of 15 minutes and check KYC documents and they have these checkbooks and they are basically working in producing evidences in case someone will ask, hey, did you conduct the KYC process properly, right? They don't have this investigative mindset. To really go into all those details together and look at the overall narrative of the business. And the signs are always there somewhere. It can be, as you mentioned, a fulfillment center in Shenzhen that have all sorts of businesses from totally different industries, deco, accessories, electronics, all sending into the same place. It can be a you know, ebook store, they have 4 different entities in Cyprus and, you know, Latin, LATAM, as well as 2 other places. And they just started their business like a week ago, right? There are always signs that kind of like should produce this, like we call it the smell test or the ink ink, like something doesn't make sense. But the industry is not built today to catch those things. It was built to complete the checkbox, right? And, um, yeah, complete the check marks and approve people, you know.

But I think companies like Stripe and Square and PayPal and QuickBooks and, you know, these type of companies, they don't really underwrite. They're gonna get— they're gonna have a lot of damage on their side for sure.

And the industry feels it very strongly from all sides. And we see all sides, right? But it used to be manageable, right? Bearable, expensive, annoying, but acceptable. Now, basically, if we don't use AI in the defense, we have no ability to compete with the fraudsters. And they work at such a scale, as I mentioned, many, many entrepreneurs saw it as a business opportunity. It didn't used to be scalable, but now we can work with like all sort kind of money launderers and to produce those websites at scale that the industry never seen before and to collaborate with another supplier for the fulfillment center and someone that will answer the phone in some offshore telemarketing center somewhere in the other side of the world and they operate together. And that's why we see so many new scams, so many new issues, and the industry has to do something about it. That's why we published this book. We believe that there are many lessons learned that if we can share, people can handle this situation much better.

Yeah, but it really surprises me, like, how sophisticated these people are, but we catch them because like our form filler will show us the IP address. It will also tell us if it's masked. Um, if they— if I send them an email and they email me back, the Microsoft will say this is a new email that was recently created, right? We're also getting, you know, from my antivirus that I use, which sometimes is a pain in the butt, Avast, when you go to some of these websites, Avast, I don't know what they got in their toolbox, right? It'll say, this looks like a scam shopping site. Boom. And it's pretty funny, like, you know, the things you can find out if you really look. But, you know, agents, you know, I've had like, you know, somebody give me a referral and I'm like, no, that's not even real. They're like, what do you mean it's not real? 'No, this is a real client,' blah, blah, blah. No, no, no, no, no, this is total BS. And you have to ask yourself, like, some of the things I ask myself when I see a website, and like, we had one they sent— I don't want to put them up on the podcast because it's probably not a good idea, but you know, like, one was women's lingerie and bras and all this stuff, and we wrote back, 'Oh, we need pictures of inventory. Do you have inventory? And it was like a falling apart house. And, and, and they're like telling us that inventory— there's no way you have inventory for all this stuff in your house, you know. And you have to start to think, who's gonna buy like this stuff from this website, right? Who's gonna buy it, right? Why wouldn't they go to a regular like Victoria's Secret to buy this stuff, or some other more well-known brands, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Huh?

Exactly. Yeah. Um, the thing is that you, Allen, you have been in this industry for 20 years, right? And you've seen everything, right? Uh, and you also have the, the passion to investigate and understand those things, right? That's— you, you really love this, right? And but when you go to many of the acquirers or PSPs and you understand the environment they are living in and the pressure they have to onboard and to approve, right? And when they say no, to reason themselves also to the commercial team and to negotiate and all of that part, it's so stressful. They really, they don't have the time even to bring this curiosity that you bring when you look at the business.. And that's why we see that they miss, right? And, you know, sometimes they have this like one person that is like you, right? And he love it. And he like, you really, but again, it's not scalable, right? They have thousands of applications a month, or even if it's hundreds, you can't put this attention on each application. And that's how we see that they miss things.

But also with like electronic boarding now, You know, you're sending someone a link, they're filling all this stuff out, it goes in. Then you have this, you know, your system hooked up to like LexisNexis and all these tools, right? Automation, AI, whatever. Now the underwriter, you know, is not, you know, Googling themself, right? So now they see, oh, there's a picture, there's a restaurant there, there's a website, there's a Google My Business page. Oh, the Social Security number checks out, the credit is good, right? The federal tax ID is good, the bank account is verified, right? All this stuff done electronically, right? Then they go, okay, that looks like a real restaurant. Boom, approved, right? Or like I told you about the guy who got 3 clovers in the mail from 3 different companies. So that's 3 companies approved this restaurant supply place, right? Sent 3 $2,000 clovers to this guy's this dentist office, right? I mean, they didn't even Google the address. I mean, they just believed the person.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's the thing, right? Like, each one of those solutions, the fraudsters, they know the checklist. They know LexisNexis. They know the legacy merchant monitoring providers and how they operate based on keyword matches. And they know all this stuff. And they know exactly how to sneak in. And when you look in each one of those solutions or data source separately, it all looks good. But when you start asking yourself, hey, it really makes sense that they have so many entities and that actually the company is in Cyprus, but they sell to LATAM and all those like different signals, investigative signals that are there in the data but are basically being underlooked in the current process.

Yeah, we also see like a real— a lot of people ending up on the match list, and then when they go send the emails, they're like, oh my, I'm on here for stolen identity. And then we explain to them like, well, now you're going to have to prove your identity was stolen. I had one guy I was like, when's the last time you checked your credit report? It's a landscaping company. And they went up— they— he— his daughter, you know, helped me and everything and got his— they got his credit report. And there was about 8 inquiries for credit cards. Someone tried to get a loan on a truck, a bunch of other stuff. He had to go through the whole process with a lawyer to get all of those things You know, report each one of them. You have to report to the FTC. I mean, I've been dealing— I've probably dealt with at least 2 identity theft cases or 3 every month since January and even some last year, but it's really heating up. And, you know, because this scammer gets a merchant account, but then they're— they have a stolen identity of somebody. If that person owns a business, Boom, they're on the match list, right? Then they get shut off, and then they're like, why am I on the match list? I didn't do anything. And then they have to go do like a whole investigation. It's crazy.

It does, for sure. Yesterday, um, one of my team members, he called me saying that he has to go somewhere because someone stole his details from some lenders and basically opened an insurance company on his name. So the thing is that, you know, it's not just like obviously merchant fraud is something we live and breathe, but also the cybercrime, right? Developed a lot now with AI and they run agents that can exploit in a scale that we never seen before. So it's like in all the different fronts of fraud and, and fintech crime. And we see so many new cases and activity nowadays. So it's quite crazy.

So what, you know, so what kind of things can he, you know, what, what, you know, do you have any like early signals besides the ones like I talk to, you know, I talk about, but, you know, it's funny, I talk to underwriters also, right? Yeah, and the underwriters, you know, they're, you know, while some of them are very passionate and will go and dig deep, and sometimes I get mad at them like, man, this is a legitimate person like we spoke to on the phone and you're being all sketched out. And I'm like, well, what's, what are you finding that's all sketched out? And then, you know, all of a sudden they'll come up with, hey, this person has some other business. I'm like, What are you talking about? We'll go ask the person and they'll be like, no, I don't have another business. And turns out, you know, they didn't even know that somebody stole their identity. And, and, and AI, you know, is letting all this, you know, I mean, I don't know what AI they're doing because I tried to use like OpenAI and Claude and like upload a driver's, my driver's license and see if it would alter it. It won't. It says no. We'll not do that, but I'm sure people can alter driver's licenses with tools like Adobe or, you know, Deep— whatever that thing, Deep thing is from China, right? Because they don't—

I'm not going to get into the technicalities here just because, um, you know, we don't know who is listening to this podcast, but there are very specific services that those guys are using. They are very popular and crazy how cheap they are, right? Right. In basically $200, you can, you can buy a whole like application end-to-end, like ID documents, um, everything, fake website. Um, so it's quite, quite crazy. Um, so you were asking like what, what I suggest?

Yeah, like what can, you know, like what should, you know, what's advice for like someone's an agent and they're getting the applications. Like, I always say, call them on the phone, send them an email, and ask for documents. Should be your first two things. If you don't get it, if they can't answer the phone, just forget it. Just—

yeah, yeah. And it used to work perfectly, um, by the way, and it still works with some of the cases. But what we found actually, that there are companies today that do it for the fraudsters and they can answer the phone, they can be very convincing. And this method, which used to be like, I think, best practice in like a year or two years ago, it started to be obsolete too because those guys, they know, right? And then when the merchant is asking why I'm being, why I was declined, the team usually tell him like, we were sending you, we sent you a message to your support, you didn't respond. It's outside our risk policy in terms of the level of service that we accept. And that's it. Now he knows. And so it's a, it's an ongoing war, right? And the environment will change all the time with new techniques and new methods on the defense. And on the fraudster side. So I really, really think that, yes, first of all, you definitely need to have like, to understand how to distinguish between low risk to like medium and high. I think that's the first step. And then after you do that, and there are many different signs and methods that you can use, but then you do need to have some sort of like a judgment on those merchants. And this judgment, you know, it's not a secret that we sell AI agents that operate just as human underwriters and fraud and stuff. And I encourage people also to play with the tools and kind of like understand what is possible and what is possible today. And I think that we have new opportunity right now. To detect fraud much, much better and also to save a lot of the costs that are attached to those processes. The problem with those tools usually is, as you mentioned, it's the consistency, reliability. You need to produce also the evidences and, but it's definitely can help you kind of like be creative and understand better what is possible maybe and maybe implement some of those techniques. So You know, to work with a company that that's what they do.

Yeah, because you know what, Pete, when I talk to like somebody who's experienced identity theft, they're like, oh, what is the person doing? And I'm explaining like they're transaction laundering. They have stolen credit cards. They're getting the money put in their fake bank account. Then they get the money out of that bank account. And then, you know, the bank comes looking for you because you're the real person, not the— you know, the synthetic you is gone, right? And they're probably in another country. That money left that bank, went to Wise, got transferred across who knows how many, you know, bank accounts, right? And then ended up in the fraudster's pocket, right? This is the kind of stuff— that's why, like, now, like When we look at bank statements, sometimes some of the processors like, oh, we don't like it that this person has Wise on their bank statement. What are they doing? Why are they transferring all this money to Wise? Because they know that that money can be leaving the US, the banking system. And why are they doing that? So I always tell people, like, if you have a wire transfer account where you send out ACHs, you know, have it come out of another account, not your operating account that you're going to show somebody, because people will start to question like, hey, where— why is all this money, you know, going out of the— where's all this money going, right?

Yeah, sure. I think that the one thing that, you know, enough, like, if there are like risk people, underwriters listening to us right now, but I think that the mindset around risk operation, fraud, also need to change, right? Companies still looking at it quite often as a cost center. But in reality, if you are really strong on that side, you can onboard clients much, much faster. Right. And that's mandatory in today's environment. Companies that cannot fit with the speed, it's just not sustainable. Right. People expect, you know, almost instant onboarding in a way. And it also helps you understand like how to price, how to manage the risk. And again, we're all managing money here. Right. And one last, right, of, you know, $200,000 in processing of fraudulent merchant and another $150,000 in chargebacks, right? That can be like easily $320,000, you know, lost. Right. But if you're able to understand that in the first 30 days, you basically limit the impact of fraud to like $60,000. And that's huge, right? And it's all, it ends up in the numbers. So, and I don't think that throwing away more people would help to solve the problem. I think we need to be smarter because the fraudsters are not throwing away more people. They use the agent, they use AI. And the industry, I think in the realization nowadays that, yeah, something needs to change. You know, companies that I never thought are going to speak with us, reach out to us, the largest acquirers in the US. And they're like, how can we embed AI in order to monitor all those like marketplace sellers that we are processing through our ISV partners? What can we do with like the small amount of information that we have about those like global companies, entities, people, and they are hungry. They are hungry to efficiency. They are hungry to do things better. And so it's really, really exciting to see how this whole industry is completely changing from all the sides, including the card schemes and the regulators that also understand that they need to start using those tools. In order to enforce better and, and, and be efficient in the detection models.

Basically, I think that a lot of companies need to start looking at things like, you know, start with, you know, educate your agents that are sending in deals and educating them on how to spot fraud so that— because I try to explain to agents sometimes, like, if you submit a deal and it's fraudulent, now that ISO is going to look at every one of your deals, question every one of them, right? And if they take a loss, you better go look at your contract to see if you have any liabilities as far as them taking a loss, because you could be out $50,000 if they board a fraudulent client and you have something in your contract that says, you know, you share in losses. So you have to really be careful as an agent today. And then ISOs need to be careful and they need to have, you know, multiple ways that they're investigating, you know, these online applications. Like, we'll tell, we'll tell, like, the, you know, we'll tell our partner, like, hey, we got this online. Did we spoke to the client or we didn't speak to the client? Because we make sure, like, we talk to them if they're— and also, like, one of our processors, what they started doing was, is they start— they, inside the merchant application that's electronic, it gives challenge questions. But we had like 3 scammers get past that because they obviously had the person, all of these people's information. So that's not foolproof in itself. Like, that's the LexisNexis free 3 challenges, like, oh, did you live at this address? Do you have a car payment? They obviously knew all about these people, right?

You're right. Yeah, you know, putting aside for a second, like, agents that are new in the business and really don't know, like, how does it work, I think that the ones that do understand the industry, like, at the beginning, they tend to be very, very careful and, you know, to grow slowly, working on the relationships with the ISO, doing the right thing. But then there is this point of time when they try to scale and it's hard because the easy wins will always be the ones that, you know, the fraudsters will always be easy wins. And then there is another stage when they're already scaled and then they also really want to maintain like the portfolio and healthy relationships with the acquirer and everything. But All these stages that is in between is where we see basically agents that are a bit too hungry to revenues and then they damage the relationships with the acquirers and it really then stops their ability to scale. So definitely I see what you mean and what we see also from the other side of the acquirers as well as also LIZOS, that they actually want to automate the communication with the agent. So we had two acquirers that told us like, listen, I spent lots of time just explaining risk to my agents. What I want to do, I want to automate, like just explain them very quickly. They just can submit like the URL, company name, and immediately telling them whether it's within the acceptable use policy. And like just to align expectations that it's not going to be like, you know, an easy process with that merchant instead of like getting all those like phone calls and having to explain it myself. So we also see a lot of like activity right now around how to optimize this interaction that you are speaking about.

Yeah, it's, you know, It's difficult because this AI is new, and, and, you know, there's like good things with AI and then there's bad things with AI, and this is one of the bad things. So if you had to give, uh, you know, let's say 3 pieces of advice to everybody listening, to, you know, listening, they're in the business, they're in the, in our, in our business, what would be 3 pieces of advice of how they can spot scammers, or at least, you know, try to limit scammers?

Yeah, so first of all, the easy one is actually what you mentioned. Go to your portfolio and just cross-reference all the addresses. Try to see, you know, which one— which of your merchants has the same address for fulfillment center or the, uh, and understand if you already have a network within your portfolio. And if you have a portfolio of over, you know, 2,000, 3,000 merchants, I won't be surprised if you will find some connections already that can be your first case study about how your systems already let some scammers to get into your portfolio. So that's kind of just like a reality check that each one can do. I think that the second piece You know, you have to, as you mentioned, educate, right? So then if people don't have this attention and it's hard because, you know, people also expect those operation people to be fast speaking about SLA and efficiency. And when they stop something, they are the party poopers, right? But I think it's a really, really toxic environment that would at the end will make the business to pay a significant price. So I think you need to encourage those people to investigate, to be curious, because it all starts with that, right? And those people, they are smart and they know even sometimes that there are tools that are exist, but they don't always feel comfortable, um, to stop for a second to ask the right question, to do this like inking BS test that you were referring to before. And the, the third thing is that embrace the tools. Um, it's crazy what is possible nowadays, and it can increase significantly the unit economy of the Isos, the acquirers. Um, it's helped them to make investigative, kind of like high-quality decisions at scale. It helps you also to understand good merchants, right? Because there are many signs out there that you don't need to spend your time on. I saw many rule engines that people develop that are based on solutions that do keyword matching and they decline good users, like good merchants. And, you know, all those deterministic rules. Now there is a totally new area of solutions now that is available for you. And so those would be kind of like my first few points, I think, that I would recommend to our listeners.

Yeah, you got to be a little bit of a detective, you know, watch some Law Order. It would be a great TV show, right, to have a TV show and show applications coming in and go, okay, let's go look at this guy and see what's going on with that. I mean, it's just crazy because you just can't— I mean, I see people getting like, if you go on Reddit, you'll— and you go to, uh, the Stripe subreddit, you'll see all these people getting shut off, right? And they're getting shut off because they don't have meaningful presence. Every country now has this meaningful presence rule, and in the US, meaningful presence means you can't just go open a Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada, whatever corporation, then set up a federal tax ID, then get a bank account. And then so you have these pieces, but what you don't have is you don't have US ID, you don't have a— you don't have a Social Security number, so you can't get a merchant account. So what do they do? They go steal somebody's identity to go button that up, right? And then they add them to these ghost corporations where you can't go look up all the officers, right? And that's what they do. And then they get shut off because Stripe, they have a magic number, $5,000. Once somebody processes $5,000, their little engine goes to work. They go, oops, we let that guy go in, shut off. Shut off, shut off, and they don't ask any— you know, those type of companies don't ask any questions. The— I think sometimes the regular ISOs let some of that stuff get out of hand, right? Because they don't— they feel like, oh, we set up, we did the underwriting, and we don't have to monitor the transaction so much. And I think that Um, transaction monitoring, monitoring needs to get turned up a notch. And, you know, in the ISO community, from the ISOs, the, the agents, the— when you get a new merchant, you need to look at the transactions they're doing the first week and see what's going on and making sure exactly what's happening. And, you know, you know, you gotta— we gotta turn the, not the match up, but also I think Stripe and Square, PayPal, and those companies And even companies who board these ISVs like you were talking about and operating these marketplaces, I think those companies need to stop saying, oh, well, we're transaction monitoring. I think they need to do a better job on the way in. So it's like we need to take— each one needs to take a little bit from the other's playbook, you know?

Yeah, 100%. And I'll tell you what, you, you'll see like many of the ISOs, they do understand that there are many insights in their transactions, right? But then they went and they went to shop for a transaction monitoring solution. And then what they find out is that almost all of the solutions either focus on AML, right? Which is totally different mindset than merchant fraud, or they are looking a lot on the buyer fraud side.

Right.

But none of those solutions really by default really, really come with all those modules that are relevant to merchant risk impersonization that can take this like, you know, flower shop in California looking at the average ticket size on the website and saying, hey, it doesn't make sense that they have, you know, so many wrong transactions of $700 at 3 AM California time coming from B numbers that were issued in Mexico and all those like signals, right? And then they understand that they actually need, you know, to customize and to build and So, yeah, I agree with you. And just like, it requires some attention. We helped many. It took us a lot of time to work with many clients about like those merchant-focused use cases. Right. Yeah.

So if people want to get in touch with you, give us the— and I'll put a link to the book in the show notes. But how do people get in touch with you, Noam?

Yeah, sure. I'm very easy to get in touch with. They can just enter our website. They can even test out some merchants for free and see what an analysis looks like. There will be some KYC process though, because this is quite confidential. But they can just reach out to me on LinkedIn. And, and I would make sure answer.

All right, sounds good. Well, thank you for joining us on the podcast today. And, uh, you know, we gave information about, you know, what ISOs should be doing, agents should be doing, acquirers should be doing. But also, you know, if you're a merchant and you're listening to this podcast, it just basically shows you how important it is to take care of your personal credit report and monitoring that, because this synthetic problem is, is, is getting very sophisticated, and you need to keep an eye on everything. So that's what we have today. Thank you for joining us on B2B Vault, the biz-to-biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems. And check out our new NPS One gateway and smart invoicing platform. For more information, go to nationwidepaymentsystems.com. And thank you to Noam, and we'll have his information in the show notes so you can reach out to him. And he's on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn, and everybody have a great day. Peace out. And I always say, carpe diem, seize the day.