Key takeaway: Merchants and payment partners should treat clean merchant boarding and chargeback monitoring records as a compliance priority now, not a paperwork exercise, since federal fraud enforcement is shifting from reactive to proactive.
The Department of Justice has grown its National Fraud Enforcement Division to roughly 500 attorneys and staff who will mine government and commercial data to flag suspected fraud before a whistleblower complaint, agency referral, or corporate disclosure ever arrives.
The DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division was announced earlier in 2026, and on August 13, 2026, Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald signed a memorandum setting the division’s enforcement priorities and confirming it had reached roughly 500 attorneys and staff, with plans to keep expanding over the next two years, according to PYMNTS.
The division’s priority areas are fraud touching public trust and financial integrity, healthcare fraud, tax fraud, fraud in global trade and commerce, and corporate misconduct. Supporting it is a new National Fraud Detection Center staffed with data scientists, corporate enforcement specialists, asset recovery personnel, appellate lawyers, and a dedicated privilege review team, PYMNTS reported.
McDonald cited a 2024 Government Accountability Office estimate that fraud costs the federal government between $233 billion and $521 billion a year, calling the figures “worth our full and complete attention.” The administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud says it has already uncovered nearly $230 billion in fraud since January 2025.
Why it matters for merchants: Processors and ISOs that board high-risk merchants without tight chargeback rate monitoring, the same failure the FTC cited in its recent settlements with Nuvei and Humboldt Merchant Services, should expect federal scrutiny to move faster and with less advance warning, since the DOJ is now actively mining data instead of waiting for a complaint to land.
Source: PYMNTS
