Designing fraud-prevention systems that keep analysts in the loop
A technical article extending the Nerdearla Chile 2026 talk
Companion article for the Nerdearla Chile 2026 talk, Santiago, April 17, 2026.
Repository: Fraud System Architecture
Abstract
Fraud-prevention outcomes depend on rules, machine learning, operational policy, analyst work, and platform engineering. This article extends the Nerdearla Chile 2026 talk “Fraud prevention, machine learning, and design patterns: keep your analysts in the loop” with an architectural account of how these components interact.
We propose a design pattern for ML-enabled human-in-the-loop (HIL) triage. Rules handle explicit cases, machine learning estimates risk and prioritizes cases, a policy layer selects actions, and analysts investigate ambiguous cases and return structured feedback. The proposal draws on research in software architecture for ML systems, HIL design, AI design patterns, learning to defer, alert prioritization, reliable ML, and platform engineering. Human participation includes review, collaboration, and teaching throughout the system lifecycle (Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023).
1 Introduction
This article develops the architecture, design-pattern rationale, operational consequences, and MLOps practices behind the conference talk. We focus on how to integrate automated decisions with expert review in fraud operations.
Fraud systems combine deterministic controls, statistical scoring, decision policy, and human judgment1. Traffic volume and attack speed limit how much work analysts can handle manually. Ambiguous cases, changing attacker behavior, incomplete labels, asymmetric costs, and governance requirements constrain automation. The architecture needs to account for both sets of limits.
Production ML requires data pipelines, serving infrastructure, monitoring, deployment processes, and coordination across engineering roles (Amershi, Begel, et al., 2019; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Nazir et al., 2024; Sculley et al., 2015). Fraud operations add decision queues, analyst interfaces, escalation paths, and review outcomes. These components form a socio-technical system2: model outputs, human judgment, workflows, and organizational decisions jointly determine which actions are taken (Dobbe & Wolters, 2024; Salwei & Carayon, 2022).
In Figure 1, rules encode explicit knowledge and controls, machine learning combines heterogeneous signals into scores or rankings, and analysts contribute contextual judgment, novelty detection, and feedback. Their interfaces and allocation of responsibilities determine how they work together.
2 Architectural requirements in fraud prevention
Fraud systems commonly combine rules, supervised models, anomaly detection, and investigation to handle novelty, delayed labels, and operational constraints. Carcillo et al. (2021) describe a layered control structure with automated and human-supervised components. Hernandez Aros et al. (2024) document supervised, unsupervised, deep-learning, and other approaches used in financial-fraud detection.
Adversarial adaptation. Fraudsters change strategies when detection methods become known3 (Bolton & Hand, 2002). In credit-card fraud, this occurs alongside changes in legitimate customer behavior (Carcillo et al., 2021). Lunghi et al. (2023) examine the resulting challenges of concept drift, streaming constraints, limited observability, and hostile adaptation.
Delayed and imperfect labels. Labels often become available after a customer complaint or investigation4 (Carcillo et al., 2021; Lunghi et al., 2023). Unreported fraud can remain labeled as legitimate, contaminating the training data (Bolton & Hand, 2002; Carcillo et al., 2021). Fraud also includes different forms of abuse with distinct indicators (Bolton & Hand, 2002; Hernandez Aros et al., 2024). Combining these into one positive class can discard information useful for triage and investigation. The system’s decisions affect which cases are investigated and therefore which labels become available for learning and evaluation.
Asymmetric error costs. Missed fraud causes direct loss; false alarms create customer friction, investigation expense, and potential reputational harm5. Investigating every case is too expensive, so suspicion scores help allocate review effort (Bolton & Hand, 2002). Detection policy must balance those costs with timely intervention (Hernandez Aros et al., 2024).
Time sensitivity. Earlier detection can reduce the cost of a fraud event6 (Hilal et al., 2022). Suspicion ranking helps investigators prioritize urgent cases (Bolton & Hand, 2002), while online processing imposes timing constraints on detection and response (Lunghi et al., 2023). The architecture determines which decisions can be automated, which require escalation, and how analyst time is allocated (Carcillo et al., 2021).
These requirements affect the full lifecycle: development, monitoring, maintenance, and evolution (Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Muccini & Vaidhyanathan, 2021). They also require explicit decisions about infrastructure, quality attributes, and integration (Nazir et al., 2024).
4 Design-pattern rationale
We propose this architecture as a reusable response to fraud operations with automated decisions and limited review capacity. A design-pattern description10 specifies its context, competing requirements, solution, and consequences (Konieczny, 2025; Lakshmanan et al., 2020).
Existing work provides several ways to document this design knowledge11. Washizaki et al. (2020) catalog architecture patterns and anti-patterns for ML systems; Heiland et al. (2023) extend the repository of patterns for AI-based systems. Järvenpää et al. (2024) examine reusable architectural tactics, and Cruz et al. (2023) address architecture rationale and evaluation.
Andersen & Maalej (2024) catalog HIL patterns12 for data preparation, training, operation, monitoring, and explanation. These patterns give human participation defined responsibilities within the system. The broader HIL-ML literature includes active learning, interactive ML, and machine teaching13, with different forms and timing of expert intervention (Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023). In deployed systems, recommendation support, active moderation, corrective feedback, continuous learning, and explanation are relevant to fraud review queues, analyst overrides, escalation, and feedback capture (Andersen & Maalej, 2024).
The context in Figure 4 is a fraud operation where review demand exceeds analyst capacity, some cases require immediate action, attackers adapt, and errors have different costs (Bolton & Hand, 2002; Carcillo et al., 2021; Ghadermazi et al., 2024; Jalalvand et al., 2024). Response time, customer friction, detection coverage, human oversight, and available expertise impose competing requirements (Alves et al., 2025; Bolton & Hand, 2002; Jalalvand et al., 2024).
The solution combines rules, scoring, policy, analyst review, and feedback (Andersen & Maalej, 2024; Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023). Expected benefits include more efficient use of analyst time, lower friction on low-risk traffic, and more transparent decision governance (Alves et al., 2025; Andersen & Maalej, 2024; Ghadermazi et al., 2024). Adoption requires calibration, queue management, traceability, versioning, and additional integration work (Cruz et al., 2023; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Nazir et al., 2024). Documenting these consequences helps teams assess the pattern against their operating conditions (Richards & Ford, 2025).
5 Pattern components and routing
The model consumes features and estimates risk. The policy layer14 combines that estimate with operating goals and constraints. The system then approves, blocks, escalates, or routes the case to review (Figure 5).
A separate policy layer makes the rules governing business actions inspectable (Chen et al., 2022). It can account for guardrails, analyst capacity, time sensitivity, customer value, regional policy, and legal requirements (Ghadermazi et al., 2024; Jalalvand et al., 2024; Kästner, 2025). Teams can revise these decisions independently of model training.
In Figure 6, deterministic rules handle cases covered by explicit controls near the entry point. The remaining cases reach the scoring layer. Policy may approve low-risk cases automatically, mitigate clear high-risk cases, and route ambiguous cases to analysts. This gives escalation logic a defined location and separates risk estimation from decision governance.
Learning to defer15 studies the allocation of cases between automated prediction and expert review. Its treatment of expert accuracy, availability, and capacity provides a basis for investigating routing policies in this architecture (Alves et al., 2025).
6 Analyst workflow and feedback
Analyst review is a runtime component16 with specified inputs, decision authority, escalation paths, and outputs (Andersen & Maalej, 2024; Ding et al., 2023; Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023). Its design determines what evidence reviewers receive and how their conclusions affect the system.
Figure 7 shows this exchange. Models help analysts focus their attention. Analysts interpret evidence, handle exceptions, and provide feedback during production operation. Depending on the intervention, they act as reviewers, collaborators, or teachers (Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023). Tools for anomaly reasoning and management also need to support explanation, action, and iterative investigation (Ding et al., 2023).
Review outcomes should support relabeling, rule creation, threshold revision, and post-incident analysis. Kadam (2024) examine how analyst feedback can be propagated to related transactions17, allowing sparse annotations to contribute to model improvement. This is useful when attacks are weakly characterized or previously unseen. Expert review in open-set recognition18 offers a related approach to handling novelty and uncertainty (Yuan et al., 2026).
The yellow return paths in Figure 8 connect automatically approved and mitigated cases to retrospective analyst review19. Sampling these cases helps identify false positives and false negatives, then assess whether labels, thresholds, rules, or routing logic need revision. Errors may become visible after deployment through edge cases, data drift, or changed operating conditions (Chen et al., 2022; Tan Wei Hao et al., 2026). Structured review supplies corrections and additional labels (Andersen & Maalej, 2024), including when only a subset of predictions can be verified manually (Chen et al., 2022). Kadam (2024) report improvements in robustness, recall, and performance on unseen fraud patterns through reuse of human feedback.
Figure 9 summarizes the feedback cycle. Once outcomes become available, they inform rule maintenance and model development. The architecture needs a return path from operational decisions to the components that can be revised.
The workbench20 in Figure 10 presents the case information needed for investigation and captures its outcome. Alert-prioritization research identifies workload, context, analyst skill, assignment, and review efficiency as operational concerns (Ghadermazi et al., 2024; Jalalvand et al., 2024). Learning-to-defer research also accounts for differences in expert performance and availability (Alves et al., 2025).
The interface should expose case priority, contributing signals, deadlines, and available actions. It should communicate uncertainty and make oversight and intervention understandable at the point of use (Amershi, Weld, et al., 2019). Uber’s Project RADAR provides an industry example of human review used to validate and put candidate fraud rules into operation (Zelvenskiy et al., 2022).
7 System evaluation
Evaluation should cover the interactions between model outputs, analyst interpretation, workflow, and organizational action (Dobbe & Wolters, 2024; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Nazir et al., 2024). These interactions determine how an ML component performs within the larger work system (Salwei & Carayon, 2022). We organize the measures into four areas21, with policy behavior assessed across them.
Figure 11 links technical measures to the conditions under which the system is used (Dobbe & Wolters, 2024; Fazelpour, 2025). Data and input quality includes distribution shifts, missing features, and stale inputs, all of which can impair predictions (Chen et al., 2022; Kästner, 2025; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021). Model and decision quality includes precision among the cases selected for review22, recall on confirmed fraud, calibration, and deferral rate23 (Alves et al., 2025; Chen et al., 2022).
Queue and analyst operations includes backlog, review latency, analyst agreement, workload, and SLA compliance (Alves et al., 2025; Ghadermazi et al., 2024; Jalalvand et al., 2024). Runtime and platform quality includes latency, error rates, uptime, and observability (Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Tan Wei Hao et al., 2026).
Approval, review, and block rates describe policy behavior24 (Chen et al., 2022). The organization sets the policy that converts risk estimates into actions under its operating constraints (Kästner, 2025; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021). Tracking these rates alongside threshold sensitivity and queue saturation helps assess the consequences of policy changes.
The trade-offs in Figure 11 depend on the operating context (Fazelpour, 2025). Faster responses allow less time for investigation; higher detection coverage may increase customer friction; more human review requires capacity; frequent adaptation increases the work needed for auditability (Alves et al., 2025; Chen et al., 2022; Jalalvand et al., 2024). Architectural decisions should document how these requirements are balanced and evaluated (Cruz et al., 2023; Kästner, 2025; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Nazir et al., 2024; Richards & Ford, 2025).
8 MLOps and platform engineering
The pattern has a lifecycle25 in which monitoring and analyst feedback inform maintenance, retraining, and system evolution (Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021). These signals also support data curation, feature maintenance, and policy revision (Kästner, 2025; Tan Wei Hao et al., 2026).
The upper part of Figure 12 covers data capture, feature generation, training, and evaluation. The lower part covers deployment, monitoring, analyst review, and feedback. Its return paths distinguish updates to datasets and feature pipelines, improvements to models, and revisions to rules, thresholds, or routing policy.
These paths require dependable data infrastructure. Lin & Ryaboy (2013) describe workflows, recurring jobs, and infrastructure for repeatable large-scale analysis. Konieczny (2025) document patterns for ingestion, transformation, lineage, and pipeline quality. The distinction between annotation, interactive steering, and teaching in HIL systems also helps identify how different feedback signals should be used (Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023).
Monitorability26 supports maintenance and evolution (Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021). Teams also need to identify mismatches between the assumptions of different roles and components (Lewis, Bellomo, et al., 2021). Platform support can provide repeatable processes for deployment, observability, and governance (Tan Wei Hao et al., 2026), while fraud-specific feedback methods connect analyst outcomes to model maintenance (Kadam, 2024).
The shared platform27 in Figure 12 provides versioning, feature storage, a model registry, observability, and governance. These services support traceability and reduce duplicated infrastructure work across teams.
9 Expected benefits and implementation costs
The pattern is intended to allocate analyst attention to cases where expert judgment is useful (Alves et al., 2025; Jalalvand et al., 2024). Automatic handling of clear low-risk and high-risk cases can reduce customer friction and intervention delays (Jalalvand et al., 2024; Kästner, 2025). Separating policy from inference makes decision logic easier to inspect (Chen et al., 2022; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021), and structured review outcomes provide inputs for rule maintenance and model improvement (Andersen & Maalej, 2024; Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023).
Adoption adds components and integration work (Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Nazir et al., 2024). Queue monitoring must cover backlog, latency, workload, and assignment quality (Ghadermazi et al., 2024; Jalalvand et al., 2024). Decision logic needs versioning and an audit trail, and feedback data needs defined capture and governance practices (Cruz et al., 2023; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021). Software engineers, data scientists, risk operators, and analysts must coordinate changes to shared system behavior (Nazir et al., 2024; Richards & Ford, 2025). These costs belong in the adoption decision.
9.1 Common failure modes
Coupling scoring and policy.28 When a model output directly triggers an action, the governing business logic can become difficult to inspect (Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Washizaki et al., 2020). Tight coupling also complicates diagnosis: failures may arise from the model, the business logic, or their interaction (Washizaki et al., 2020). The separate policy layer described in Section 5 makes these responsibilities explicit and allows decision logic to be revised independently (Kästner, 2025; Washizaki et al., 2020).
Unstructured review outcomes.29 Free-text notes alone make analyst conclusions difficult to reuse (Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023). Structured fields for outcome, reason code, confidence, and suggested action make feedback available to operation, monitoring, and subsequent improvement (Andersen & Maalej, 2024; Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023). Notes can retain the context needed to interpret those fields.
Incomplete operational design. Queue design, escalation logic, and the analyst interface require attention during development. Alert volume can overwhelm reviewers, and workload, fatigue, skill, and case context affect review quality (Jalalvand et al., 2024). These requirements need to be coordinated with model development and system maintenance (Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Nazir et al., 2024).
Insufficient monitoring. Lewis, Ozkaya, et al. (2021) identify monitorability as an architectural driver for maintenance and evolution. Queue overload, rising analyst disagreement, and calibration drift can indicate degradation while the service remains available (Jalalvand et al., 2024; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021). Monitoring should cover these conditions from deployment.
Unmanaged integration complexity.30 Washizaki et al. (2020) describe the ML anti-patterns “glue code” and “pipeline jungles.” In fraud systems, feature joins, rule engines, scoring services, case queues, and alerting tools can accumulate under delivery pressure. Shared interfaces, traceability, and versioning help keep these dependencies maintainable (Kästner, 2025; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Washizaki et al., 2020).
These failure modes identify requirements for adopting the pattern: explicit policy, structured feedback, operational design, monitoring, and maintainable integrations (Andersen & Maalej, 2024; Lewis, Ozkaya, et al., 2021; Washizaki et al., 2020). Documenting the responsibilities and failure conditions supports architectural review across software, data, policy, and analyst work (Cruz et al., 2023; Richards & Ford, 2025).
10 Contribution to ML-enabled software architecture
Muccini & Vaidhyanathan (2021) call for better architecting practices and clearer standards for ML-based systems. Nazir et al. (2024) consolidate design challenges, practices, and architectural decisions. Existing work covers hidden technical debt, architecture mismatch, HIL patterns, monitorability, evaluation, and internal platforms; documenting their application to specific domains can help teams use that knowledge.
Fraud operations make the interactions between these concerns visible. Decisions affect financial loss, customer experience, investigation workload, escalation, and organizational risk. A socio-technical account includes human and institutional decisions within the system boundary (Dobbe & Wolters, 2024), considers workflow, users, technology, and organizational context together (Salwei & Carayon, 2022), and treats ML as part of an operational product (Kästner, 2025). HIL research provides methods for specifying how people participate in that system (Andersen & Maalej, 2024; Mosqueira-Rey et al., 2023).
Our contribution is to document the combination of rules, scoring, policy, analyst review, and feedback as a reusable architecture for fraud operations. It builds on established HIL approaches and ML pattern catalogs (Andersen & Maalej, 2024; Washizaki et al., 2020). The description identifies component responsibilities, routing and feedback mechanisms, governance requirements, and adoption costs, following production ML engineering and architectural practice (Kästner, 2025; Richards & Ford, 2025).
11 Open questions
Policy optimization. How should routing policy adapt to risk scores, analyst capacity, SLA pressure, and business value over time?
Feedback quality. Which analyst signals lead to useful system improvements, and how should analyst disagreement be represented? Learning-to-defer research considers expert heterogeneity and capacity constraints (Alves et al., 2025). Their interaction with fraud-specific roles and queue dynamics needs further study. Expert review for unknown attack detection through open-set recognition offers a related direction to investigate (Yuan et al., 2026).
Architecture evaluation. How should scenario-based evaluation be adapted to fraud operations? Existing work addresses architecture evaluation for ML systems (Cruz et al., 2023; Nazir et al., 2024). Fraud-specific scenarios should exercise queue saturation, feature outages, delayed labels, and adversarial shifts to assess behavior after deployment (Chen et al., 2022; Jalalvand et al., 2024; Lunghi et al., 2023).
Internal platforms. Which capabilities should be shared across fraud and risk teams? Fragmented scripts, dashboards, and services can make coordination, orchestration, and operational visibility difficult. Lin & Ryaboy (2013) describe these infrastructure problems across data workflows and frameworks. Internal ML platforms can support automation, monitoring, deployment, and developer experience (Tan Wei Hao et al., 2026). Orchestration, observability, provenance, and infrastructure maintenance are relevant requirements for such a platform (Kästner, 2025).
LLMs in analyst workflows.31 How can case summarization, natural-language explanations, and conversational investigation support be integrated with structured feedback and audit requirements? LLM components introduce requirements for interface design, validation, observability, guardrails, and evaluation (Tan Wei Hao et al., 2026). Their role in this pattern requires further design and assessment, particularly where generated summaries or explanations inform analyst decisions.
12 Conclusion
ML-enabled HIL triage assigns explicit responsibilities to rules, models, policy, analysts, and platform services. Rules apply known controls, models estimate risk, policy selects actions, and analysts investigate cases and record structured outcomes. Feedback supports updates to data, rules, models, and routing logic.
The pattern requires evaluation of data quality, decision quality, review operations, runtime health, and policy behavior. Its usefulness depends on whether the organization can maintain those components and coordinate changes over time. We offer it as a documented architecture for teams designing fraud systems with automated decisions and expert review.
Contact
I’d be glad to hear your questions, disagreements, or experiences with fraud review systems.
- LinkedIn: José Pablo Barrantes
- BlueSky: doggofan77.bsky.social
References
Footnotes
Hybrid system: A fraud system combining deterministic rules, ML scoring, decision policy, and expert human judgment.↩︎
Socio-technical system: A system whose behavior is shaped by technical components, such as models and infrastructure, and human work, such as analyst review and organizational decisions.↩︎
Adversarial adaptation: Fraudsters change tactics in response to known defenses, requiring continued monitoring and revision of detection methods.↩︎
Label delay and imperfection: Confirmation depends on complaints and investigations. Undetected fraud can contaminate the legitimate class, and a binary label can obscure different forms of abuse.↩︎
Asymmetric error costs: False negatives and false positives have different financial and operational consequences. Policy must reflect those differences.↩︎
Time sensitivity: The usefulness of a fraud decision depends on whether it arrives in time to support intervention.↩︎
Hidden technical debt: Maintenance burden arising from data dependencies, pipelines, configuration, serving, monitoring, and integration code around an ML model.↩︎
Co-architecting: Coordinated design of the runtime system and the model-development pipeline.↩︎
Co-versioning: Traceable versions of data, features, models, evaluation artifacts, and policy thresholds allow post-incident analysis to reconstruct the decision state.↩︎
Design pattern: A reusable solution to a recurring problem in a specific context, documented with its forces, solution, and consequences.↩︎
ML architecture patterns: Washizaki et al. identify 33 ML patterns and anti-patterns. Heiland et al. document 70 AI-system patterns.↩︎
HIL patterns: Reusable designs for human participation in data preparation, training, operation, monitoring, and explanation.↩︎
HIL-ML approaches: Active learning, interactive ML, and machine teaching differ in how and when human expertise contributes to learning.↩︎
Decision policy: Explicit logic that combines model scores with business and operational constraints to select an action.↩︎
Learning to defer (L2D): A framework for deciding whether to handle a case automatically or route it to an expert, accounting for their expected performance.↩︎
Analyst workflow: A review process with structured inputs, such as ranked cases and reason codes, and structured outputs, such as decisions and feedback.↩︎
Feedback propagation: Reuse of analyst annotations across related observations, such as transactions connected in a graph.↩︎
Open-set recognition: Identifying observations outside the known classes. Expert review can help characterize these unfamiliar cases.↩︎
Retrospective audit: Review of automatically resolved cases to detect errors and assess changes to labels, thresholds, rules, or routing logic.↩︎
Analyst workbench: An interface with case rankings, risk bands, reason codes, service-level agreement (SLA) timers, action controls, and structured feedback fields.↩︎
Evaluation areas: Data and input quality; model and decision quality; queue and analyst operations; runtime and platform quality. Policy behavior and trade-offs connect these areas.↩︎
Precision@k: Precision among the top-k ranked cases. Choosing k to match review capacity makes the measure relevant to the analyst queue.↩︎
Deferral rate: The fraction of cases routed to human review. This rate affects analyst workload and is controlled through routing policy.↩︎
Policy behavior: The traffic split across approval, review, and blocking, together with its sensitivity to thresholds and capacity limits.↩︎
MLOps lifecycle: Data capture, feature generation, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, analyst review, and feedback. Return paths support data curation, model improvement, and policy revision.↩︎
Monitorability: The ability to observe data quality, model quality, service health, and queue health during operation.↩︎
ML platform: Shared infrastructure for versioning, feature storage, model registration, observability, and governance.↩︎
Scoring–policy coupling: Direct dependence of business actions on model outputs without explicit, separately maintained decision logic.↩︎
Unstructured review: Review records that lack consistent outcome fields, limiting their use in evaluation and maintenance.↩︎
Pipeline jungle: A collection of interdependent processing steps and services whose interfaces and maintenance responsibilities are poorly defined.↩︎
LLM integration: Potential support for case summaries, natural-language reason codes, and conversational investigation, subject to evaluation of feedback quality, auditability, and governance.↩︎