The Northbank dossier.
Six weeks at a PSP risk desk, one list of cards, three merchants, and a decision you record before you are told what it cost.
A new senior analyst joins the three-person risk desk at Northbank Pay, a European PSP for high-risk merchants, and inherits an overnight burst at a gift-card merchant that looks like card testing and is not quite. The same list of cards turns up receiving credits at a supplements merchant and depositing at a casino, and each week the desk has to choose an action, price it, and live with it. Every episode ends with a decision for you to record before the next one shows what Ines, Tomas and the analyst actually did and what it cost. The investigation closes on a proportionate decision and an unresolved piece of evidence that was there before anything else.
Fictional scenarios, synthetic data. All instalments available. Follow at your own pace; progress stays on this browser.
The quiet Tuesday.
A burst at Pondside Gifts looks like card testing for about ten seconds. Then the distinct-card count comes back.
Begin readingSixty-one familiar cards.
The list has been seen before, at a merchant that sells vitamins. The money there is flowing the wrong way.
Begin readingA credit is not a refund.
Hollow Oak had a bad batch in October and a goodwill budget to match. Most of the credits are honest. The desk has to find the ones that are not.
Begin readingThe money has to leave somewhere.
The credits stop. Three weeks later the same cards appear at Lagoon Casino, deposit, barely play, and ask for a bank transfer.
Begin readingSix bank accounts, one of them old.
Under a 72-hour hold the desk rebuilds the timeline. One of the six bank accounts has been at Lagoon for fourteen months, and it belongs to a player called Dario.
Begin readingA proportionate decision.
The desk closes what it can close, names what each action cost, and is left with seventeen cards and one IP address that were there before anything else.
Begin reading