Darwinium Wins 2026 Datos Insights Award Impact for Best Scam and APP Fraud Prevention Innovation

Datos Insights recognizes Darwinium’s edge-based, journey-level risk decisioning platform for helping financial institutions detect scammer-influenced sessions and intervene before money moves.

We’re excited to announce that Darwinium has been named the winner of the 2026 Datos Insights Impact Award for Best Scam and Authorized Push Payment (APP) Fraud Prevention Innovation.

The award recognizes Darwinium’s edge-based, journey-level risk decisioning platform and its approach to detecting scams continuously across digital banking journeys—not simply at login or at the point of payment.

In its 2026 Impact Awards in Fraud report, Datos Insights highlights how Darwinium combines updated Android and iOS SDKs with graph-based, stateful journey orchestration to identify indicators of scammer influence, including live call activity, screen sharing, remote-access tools and other forms of device and session manipulation.

That distinction matters because the nature of APP fraud has changed the problem financial institutions need to solve.

APP fraud is a journey problem, not simply an authentication problem

Many traditional fraud controls are designed to answer a familiar question: Is this really the customer?

But in an APP scam, the answer can be yes.

The customer may be using their normal phone. They may have entered the correct credentials and successfully completed multifactor authentication. They may even be making the payment themselves.

The problem is that somebody else may be influencing their actions.

A scammer could be talking to the victim on a live call, viewing their screen, using remote-access software, or coaching them through the steps required to make a payment.

As Datos Insights puts it, the fraud in these situations does not necessarily reside in the credentials or the device. It resides in the session context.

That creates a significant blind spot for fraud controls that concentrate primarily on authentication or analyze the final transaction as an isolated event.

Solving the problem requires a broader view of what is happening before, during and between those individual events.

Detecting scammer influence as it happens

Darwinium provides continuous risk intelligence across the digital customer journey, bringing together device, behavioral, identity and transaction context to understand how risk develops over time.

For mobile interactions, Darwinium’s Android and iOS SDKs can capture device and session-integrity signals such as live call activity, screen sharing, remote-access activity, accessibility abuse, sideload events, root and jailbreak indicators, screen overlays, behavioral biometrics and keyboard cadence.

Crucially, these signals aren’t treated as standalone reasons to block a customer.

Context matters.

A live call, for example, does not automatically mean somebody is being scammed. Nor does unusual navigation or a change in payment behavior necessarily indicate fraud on its own.

Darwinium combines these signals within a stateful, journey-level view, allowing risk teams to evaluate factors such as timing, hesitancy, sequence, concurrency, transaction value and payment velocity together.

The objective is to understand not simply what a customer is doing, but the context surrounding how they arrived at that action.

Moving from population-level assumptions to individual customer context

One of the capabilities highlighted by Datos Insights is Darwinium’s per-user, per-device dynamic profiling.

Instead of relying solely on population-wide thresholds to decide whether something looks suspicious, organizations can establish what normal behavior looks like for an individual customer and device.

This provides important context for scam detection.

An event that looks unusual across a broad population might be entirely normal for one customer. Conversely, a seemingly innocuous event can be highly significant if it has never previously occurred for that particular user or device.

Darwinium’s behavioral identification capabilities use device and behavioral signatures to recognize similarities between interactions and establish additional context around returning users and potentially risky behavior.

For fraud teams, that opens the door to more targeted intervention—applying friction when the surrounding risk warrants it rather than treating every customer or payment in the same way.

From isolated fraud checks to continuous journey intelligence

The Datos Insights report describes four integrated technical layers behind Darwinium’s approach: unified SDK telemetry, dynamic behavioral profiling, journey orchestration, and edge-based decisioning and response.

Together, they allow financial institutions to connect risk intelligence across interactions such as account origination, device linking, login, account changes and payments.

This continuous approach is important because scams rarely begin at the payment confirmation screen.

There may be signals earlier in the journey: a change in how someone interacts with their device, unusual navigation, remote-access activity, changes to account information or beneficiaries, or payment behavior that falls outside the customer's established profile.

Darwinium is designed to bring these signals into a common journey context rather than leaving fraud teams to reconstruct the story from disconnected point-in-time assessments.

Decisioning at the edge: acting before money moves

Visibility alone isn't enough. Scam prevention also depends on being able to respond while the interaction is still happening.

Darwinium deploys risk decisioning at the edge, closer to the digital interaction. This enables organizations to evaluate risk and orchestrate responses before fraud propagates further downstream.

Depending on an institution's policies and risk appetite, responses can include allowing trusted activity to continue, enriching the session with additional intelligence, introducing step-up authentication, routing an event for review, holding a transaction or blocking high-risk activity.

This approach also supports Darwinium’s broader philosophy of dynamically tailoring digital journeys according to trust and risk rather than introducing blanket friction for every user.

Shifting scam prevention from reimbursement to intervention

Perhaps the most important measure of fraud technology is what happens in production.

Datos Insights highlights several reported outcomes from Darwinium deployments.

In one deployment, a previous scam wave had generated more than 608 customer complaints. During a subsequent smishing-related incident, Darwinium identified 5,731 compromised accounts before those customers had self-reported them, allowing the institution to initiate proactive password resets before funds were moved.

The report also cites Darwinium-reported results including 1 million fraudulent events detected and blocked in a single month, a 70% reduction in step-up costs associated with credit-card testing, and protection of more than 100 million monthly interactions at GoTyme Bank.

These results illustrate an important change in the operating model for fraud teams: moving from discovering fraud through complaints and investigating losses after the event toward identifying compromised or manipulated journeys early enough to intervene.

Why journey-level fraud prevention matters in 2026

The wider Datos Insights report describes a fraud environment increasingly shaped by automation, coordination, AI and social engineering.

Traditional credentials and multifactor authentication remain important security controls, but they cannot independently identify every form of fraud that occurs after a legitimate customer has authenticated.

Similarly, transaction monitoring alone can miss the behavioral and device context that explains why an otherwise legitimate-looking payment is being made.

Datos Insights identifies coached scams, social engineering and agentic transaction fraud as an important market challenge, noting the role of device-session signals such as remote-access tools, live calls and mule activity in detecting potentially manipulated payments.

For financial institutions, this means the distinction between authentication, fraud detection and transaction monitoring is becoming increasingly blurred.

Risk needs to be understood continuously.

Recognition for a different approach to scam and APP fraud prevention

Datos Insights evaluated the 2026 Fraud Impact Award nominations against criteria including level of innovation, competitive advantage, customer-experience impact, operational efficiency, market needs, financial crime risk mitigation, integration and scalability, and future roadmap.

Being selected as the Best Scam and APP Fraud Prevention Innovation winner is therefore significant recognition of the approach we have taken at Darwinium: moving fraud prevention beyond individual events and toward continuous understanding of the complete digital journey.

Because stopping the next generation of scams requires more than confirming that the right person logged in.

It requires understanding what is happening to that person throughout the session—and having the intelligence and control to act before the money is gone.

Download the 2026 Impact Awards in Fraud report

Read the full Datos Insights 2026 Impact Awards in Fraud report to explore the changing fraud landscape, why Datos Insights selected Darwinium as the Best Scam and APP Fraud Prevention Innovation winner, and the capabilities and outcomes behind the award.