Forter Launches Identity Monitoring for Agentic Commerce

Identity-intelligence platform provider Forter has launched a service that it says enables digital merchants to vet AI agents across the entire shopping process, including payment. The new capability within the Forter platform is intended to help merchants combat fraud in the artificial-intelligence era, which has seen the rise of AI agents that perform such tasks as offering personalized product recommendations to shoppers and product discovery.

The new service, which Forter says is the first in a series aimed at helping digital merchants build trust in AI agents, can detect when a consumer is engaging in AI-assisted shopping and differentiate malicious AI agents from legitimate ones. The app can also distinguish different types of AI agents, such as reflex- and goal-based agents, and AI agents that learn.

Criminals have been rapidly adopting the use of AI agents to commit fraud, launch malicious attacks against businesses, create fake consumer accounts, take over accounts, and masquerade as legitimate AI agents.

“AI has lowered the barrier to fraud entry. It is no longer just career criminals or sophisticated hackers. Anyone with intent can now use AI-powered tools to commit fraud across the customer lifecycle,” Cyndy Lobb, Forter’s chief product officer, says by email. “From account creation and takeovers to purchases and returns, we are seeing a surge in automation being used to exploit weaknesses at scale.”

Criminals are using AI agents to create synthetic identities that can bypass traditional fraud detection, test stolen consumer credentials, and submit fake claims for refunds at scale. Such tactics are disrupting the consumer-merchant relationship by making it harder for merchants to understand a shopper’s intent. That’s a problem because the e-commerce model is built on a direct connection between brands and individual consumers or households, according to Lobb.

“Many of today’s product, marketing, and merchandising decisions are based on customer behavior and purchase patterns, Lobb says. “If agents are inserted into the flow, those signals can become distorted or incomplete. For large platforms with retail media networks, the impact can undermine ad targeting and attribution tied to known customers.

The use of AI agents by criminals also makes it harder for merchants to verify identity and personalize consumer experiences, Lobb adds.

Helping fuel criminals’ use of AI agents is that the technology is rapidly becoming popular with online shoppers. Within the next five years, AI agents are projected to be generating 20% of consumer-driven digital traffic, according to Gartner. In addition, Forter says it has seen a 50% increase in fraud using scripted and automated attack modes, which can be carried out by AI agents to rapidly change identities and manipulate images.

“AI agents are being adopted to enhance the customer experience by making product discovery, comparisons, and transactions faster, seamless, and more personalized,” Lobb says. “As these tools become more accessible, they’re transforming how shoppers engage and enabling new opportunities for brands to increase loyalty, repeat purchases, and customer satisfaction.”

Looking ahead, Forter plans to release services that use multiple agents for automating policies, build insights into behavior trends across the customer base, and provide agentic tokenization.