ThetaRay Gamifies Financial Defense at Money20/20 Europe with a Compliance Twist on “Where’s Waldo”

With “Spot The Money Mule”, ThetaRay unites Agentic AI and public education to disrupt criminal recruitment; pushing for an ecosystem-wide stand against illicit finance.

ThetaRay, a leader in AI infrastructure for financial crime compliance, today unveiledSpot The Money Mule at Money20/20 Europe. The high-speed online game is a compliance twist on "Where’s Waldo" for the AI age, designed to bridge the gap between complex banking infrastructure and the public’s role in stopping global crime.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260602629234/en/

The game challenges players to find a money mule hidden in plain sight across five buzzing everyday scenes, from the morning rush at an airport to the vibrant rows of a Dutch Tulip Festival.

“In the AI age, the most dangerous threats are those that blend perfectly into the speed of our digital lives,” said Garima Chaudhary, VP Financial Crime & Compliance AI at ThetaRay. “In the game, you look for a 'Known' face. In the real world, there is no obvious profile. While humans struggle to spot one person in a crowd, our AI monitors behavioral baselines to detect invisible patterns in millions of transactions that are undetectable to the naked eye.”

The game’s settings are made up of night markets and crowded transit hubs, mirroring the digital spaces where money-mule recruitment is currently exploding. By making detection clear, fun, and shareable, ThetaRay highlights the challenges of identifying financial criminals among the crowd without the help of sophisticated detection tools while turning compliance into a viral, collective defense mission. In addition to Spot the Money Mule, ThetaRay is calling for a joint effort from regulators, technology partners, and banks to help the public navigate the traps of modern fraud and money laundering.

“Fighting financial crime is an ecosystem mission, not a solo one,” said Brad Levy, CEO of ThetaRay. “We’re moving in lockstep with the latest mandates from the FCA and Europol, who have warned that money mule recruitment is now targeting victims as young as 12 in the digital spaces where they live and play. While we provide our partners— from tier-1 banks to digital challengers— with Ray Platform, our investigative AI Suite overlaying legacy systems, we’re also answering the global call for transparency set by the new EU AMLA. By uniting technology and an informed public, we support a unified defense for a more resilient financial system.”

Complementing the game, ThetaRay will host a MoneyLab session, The Glass Box, where CEO Brad Levy and VP Garima Chaudhary will demonstrate how traceable human-in-control agentic AI meets the EU transparency mandates for high-risk systems. Participants will step into a live investigation to manage a money mule case study, using Ray’s traceability to replace black box logic with audit-ready case files.

About ThetaRay

ThetaRay is a leading provider of AI infrastructure for financial crime compliance. Its proprietary AI mimics human intuition to detect hidden criminal networks and deliver actionable insights. The platform’s solutions overcome the limitations of traditional rule-based systems by shortening long implementation lifecycles, enabling efficient, risk-aware compliance operations. Ray platform, the agentic AI investigation layer enables financial institutions to continuously investigate alerts with complete, explainable, audit-ready case files. By transforming compliance from a regulatory obligation into a driver of growth, ThetaRay allows firms to scale faster and expand confidently. Implemented at leading institutions including Santander, Clear Bank, Mashreq Bank and Payoneer, ThetaRay fosters trust across the global financial ecosystem. For more information, visit www.thetaray.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260602629234/en/