There's no point in locking the barn door after the cows runaway. Ditto for detecting fraud after criminals already have lootedan account.

Enter FraudNet, a service now offered by Grand Rapids, Mich., CUSOCU*Answers that is intended to nip fraud in the bud beforeeither institutions or their members lose money.

FraudNet – which CU*Answers purchased from Fiserv – is apredictive analytics toolset that scans pending transactionsagainst a database of known high-risk activities, IP addresses andlike indicators.

“We went live with FraudNet March 4 and we have stopped $148,000in actual fraudulent transactions as of today (Aug. 6),” said JimVilker, a CU*Answers vice president who heads up thisactivity.

“In fact, two days after we went live we stopped a $20,000bust-out scheme.”

“I was not expecting to see so much fraud, so fast,” saidVilker.

The appeal of FraudNet, Vilker explained, is that it essentiallyrides on top of the bill pay rails and it continually monitors forpending transactions it believes are questionable. When it findsone, it alerts CU*Answers, which passes the alert onto the involvedcredit union, for review with the member whose account is inplay.

“We have logged north of 30 incidents. We already are positiveROI,” said Vilker, who declined to reveal what CU*Answers paid forFraudNet.

Vilker also said around 137 credit unions are using theCU*Answers FraudNet tools.