The fraud that pays in full

Two credit accounts land on a risk analyst's desk in the same month. Both sit near their respective limits. Both have stopped paying. Both are sliding into delinquency. On this month's statement, they are indistinguishable.

One is a family that lost an income and is drowning. The other is a fraudster who spent half a year building a spotless record so the line would be raised, and has now drawn every available dollar with no intention of paying it back.

Freeze the wrong one and you either let a fraud loss run to charge-off, or you slam the line on a struggling borrower at the worst possible moment. This is the problem behind [bustout detection ( was a card-fraud ring that turned out to be an artefact of the data. The second (.