Chainalysis has acquired Alterya, the AI-powered fraud detection solution that identifies scammers before they meet their victims.
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Since launching in stealth, Alterya has already begun working with top cryptocurrency exchanges and fintech companies including Binance, Coinbase, and Block, as well as top financial institutions, to monitor more than $8B in transactions per month across crypto and fiat rails to protect 100M end users from the growing threat of authorized fraud.
Alterya detected $10B sent to scams in 2024, and worked with their customers to proactively prevent fraud, minimize losses, and build customer trust. With Alterya, Chainalysis is doubling down on its strategy to invest in the prevention of illicit transactions, following its acquisition last month of the web3 security solution Hexagate.
Fraud and scams have long been a scourge on the financial services industry, from the rise of credit card fraud to today’s sophisticated social engineering scams. Generative AI makes fraud more scalable and affordable to conduct — scammers can easily produce high-fidelity fake content and identities, deceiving users across social media and communication platforms to authorize payments under false pretenses.
This makes it more difficult for financial institutions and crypto businesses to detect when scammers quickly monetize through crypto and real-time payment systems. Indeed, according to Alterya’s research, 85% of scams involve fully verified accounts that bypass traditional identity-based solutions. Both fraud detection and compliance rely on granular, real-time data, and combining Alterya technology with the Chainalysis blockchain data platform will bolster the effectiveness of each, building network effects across blockchains and other digital payment rails, enhancing Alterya’s ability to uncover more fraudulent activity.
With this acquisition, Chainalysis can now provide real-time proactive fraud protection for payments and enhanced fraud detection during KYC for exchanges, blockchains, and wallet providers. Alterya has already helped top crypto exchanges decrease fraud by 60%, reduce scam-related disputes, and improve efficiency of manual operations.
Government agencies may also leverage Alterya’s insights for lead generation into pig butchering, scams, and other emerging authorized fraud trends. Chainalysis will continue to build upon Alterya’s collection of fraud identifiers on fiat payment rails to provide insights to financial services firms on the fiat accounts where customers are losing money to fraud — often an early red flag before funds move into crypto.
About Alterya
Founded in 2022, Alterya empowers financial institutions, digital wallets, and crypto service providers prevent authorized-push-payment (APP) fraud by detecting scams targeting their users.
About Chainalysis
Chainalysis offers cryptocurrency investigation and compliance solutions to global law enforcement agencies, regulators, and businesses as they work together to fight illicit cryptocurrency activity. Backed by Benchmark and other leading names in venture capital, Chainalysis builds trust in blockchains.
