How Entrepay strengthened its fraud detection strategy

Fraud prevention doesn’t just protect a business — it strengthens it. That mindset guided Entrepay’s partnership with Mastercard and its adoption of the Acquirer Security Program (ASP). Entrepay, a payment technology company headquartered in Brazil, processes between seven and eight million transactions each month and provides acquiring infrastructure and white‑label solutions for sub‑acquirers and fintechs. With innovation, technology and security at its core, the company continues to grow as a key player in Brazil’s fast‑moving payments ecosystem.

Entrepay faced a growing risk: fraudulent merchants hiding under sub‑acquirers and blending into legitimate transaction flows until losses had already occurred. Traditional monitoring approaches left blind spots, making it difficult to uncover these hidden threats in time. The team relied on slow, manual processes and piloted external tools, but none delivered the speed or precision needed to keep pace. Fraud continued to evolve, with high‑risk sectors such as gambling and betting proving notoriously difficult to monitor. Entrepay needed a solution to rapidly detect, score and prioritize suspicious behavior, giving teams the ability to act quickly on high‑risk cases.

Entrepay turned to the Acquirer Security Program, Mastercard’s risk management platform that helps acquirers and their partners detect hidden fraud and monitor high‑risk merchants at scale. By consolidating key risk scores and monitoring tools into a single dashboard, it supports faster, data‑driven decisions.

Powered by eight scores available for different risk scenarios, the platform enabled Entrepay to focus on the five foundational scores most relevant to their pain points — Merchant Fraud Risk, Merchant Financial Risk, Alternative Identity, Ghost Merchant, and Excessive Fraud chargeback — helping them surface hidden threats and act with greater speed and precision. Entrepay prioritized the modules most critical to its strategy, such as Merchant Monitoring and Merchant Risk Predict Scores, while retaining the flexibility to expand into additional onboarding features like MID Check or Onboard Risk Check.

The results were immediate and transformative. Through the Acquirer Security Program, Entrepay shifted from reactive, manual processes to a proactive, data‑driven fraud defense system. The platform surfaced high‑risk entities processing between 50,000 and 800,000 transactions per month without any physical presence, along with illegal credit card cash‑out schemes that had previously gone undetected.

As the solution became part of Entrepay’s daily workflow, the company moved from time‑consuming case reviews to score‑based prioritization, freeing fraud teams to focus on the most urgent threats. Fraudulent merchants that once took months to detect were now identified and deactivated within one to two weeks.

Using advanced indicators such as Ghost Merchant scores, merchant category code divergence and chargeback patterns, the team improved detection accuracy by 25% and cut resolution times from months to days. Today, 90% of flagged cases result in merchant disqualification — a testament to precise scoring and swift action. These gains translated directly into business results: reduced chargebacks that protected revenue, improved market trust and stronger regulatory standing within the payments ecosystem.

Mastercard’s Acquirer Security Program’s predictive scoring has become central to Entrepay’s fraud strategy — helping the team identify high‑risk merchants faster and act before losses occur. Companies looking to detect fraud earlier, reduce investigation time and fortify their fraud strategy should consider partnering with Mastercard.