TL;DR: The Global Anti-Scam Summit America 2026 runs September 2-3 at Pier 48 in San Francisco, convening banks, telecoms, platforms, law enforcement, regulators and civil society around a single problem. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance's Global State of Scams 2025, consumers across the 42 markets surveyed lost roughly $442 billion to scams in twelve months. Tickets are priced by sector from $299 to $1,499, and virtual attendance is free.
The essentials
The summit is organized by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a non-profit that coordinates anti-scam work across industry, government and law enforcement. The America edition is one of three regional summits GASA runs each year, alongside Europe and Asia.
The tiered pricing is deliberate and worth understanding before registering. GASA prices access by the resources of the attending organization rather than charging a flat rate, which is how the room ends up containing regulators and victim-support NGOs alongside large banks and vendors. Organizations facing genuine cost barriers — NGOs, law enforcement, government agencies — can contact GASA directly about discounted or waived fees, and group rates are available.
Welcome drinks take place at the Gotham Clubhouse Reception on the evening of September 1, from 8pm to 10pm. For a two-day summit where the working groups depend on people already being comfortable with each other, arriving a day early is a better use of a travel budget than it sounds.
Who actually attends
The defining feature of this summit is that it is not a banking conference. Scams do not stay inside one sector, and neither does the attendee list. GASA reports more than 500 organizations represented at its previous America summit, drawn from financial services, technology, telecommunications, cybersecurity, government and policy, law enforcement, and civil society.
In practice that means the person sitting next to a bank's head of fraud might work in trust and safety at a social platform, or in network abuse at a mobile carrier, or in a state attorney general's office. GASA's own 2026 policy agenda goes further, describing fraud and scams as the single largest category of crime globally. That framing changes the character of the conversation. A discussion about authorized push payment fraud that includes the telecom carrying the initial text message and the platform hosting the fake investment advertisement covers ground that no bank-only panel can reach.
The summit's editorial board reflects that spread: Ayelet Biger-Levin, CEO of RangersAI; Brian Gorman, Fintech Lead at GSMA; and Kenneth Westbrook, Founder and CEO of Stop Scams Alliance. A mobile industry body, a scam-prevention advocacy group and a technology vendor shaping the same agenda is a reasonable proxy for how GASA thinks about the problem.
For compliance and fraud practitioners, the useful consequence is exposure to the parts of the scam lifecycle that happen before money moves. Most financial crime conferences begin at the transaction. This one begins at the advertisement, the phone call and the fake profile, which is where the intervention is cheapest.
What's on the agenda
GASA frames the 2026 America summit as a shift from exploring solutions to deploying them, under the banner "Where Innovation Meets Action." The organizers have been explicit that the intent this year is scale and implementation rather than problem definition, on the reasoning that the sector has spent several years describing the threat accurately and rather less time shipping cross-sector countermeasures.
Five focus areas run through the published programme:
The format mixes powerful keynotes, educational breakout sessions, actionable working groups and structured networking. The working groups are the differentiator. They are smaller, collaborative sessions built to produce something rather than to transmit information, and they are the reason a two-day summit can move an industry position forward.
GASA had not published a full session-by-session agenda for the America summit at the time of writing, so treat the areas above as the reliable guide to content and check the event page closer to the date for named sessions and speakers.
Sessions worth prioritizing
If a fraud or compliance lead can only commit to part of the programme, the working groups deserve first claim on the calendar. Keynotes are usually recorded and often available afterward through the virtual stream. Working group discussions are not, and the value of being in the room is not the content but the people who become reachable afterward.
The identity verification and cross-border collaboration threads are the two most directly applicable to a bank or payments firm. Identity verification connects to onboarding controls that most institutions are already revisiting, and cross-border collaboration is where information-sharing arrangements actually get negotiated. The enforcement sessions matter more for institutions that regularly refer cases and want a realistic picture of what happens after a referral leaves the building.
The Scam Fighter Awards and the networking sessions are worth attending for a specific reason that has nothing to do with recognition. Scam typologies move between sectors faster than they move between institutions in the same sector, and the awards programme surfaces the organizations doing something unusual. That is cheaper intelligence than most threat feeds.
Practitioners who want to prepare the underlying concepts beforehand may find it useful to review how fraud and AML functions are converging and how modern fraud detection methods work in production, since both come up repeatedly in cross-sector discussions where participants do not share vocabulary.
How to prepare
Register early — GASA has been running a 15% discount on advance registration — and get the ticket tier right, since it determines cost by a factor of five between the lowest and highest bands.
Download the official GASA app before travelling. Attendees get full access, and it handles peer discovery and meeting scheduling. For a summit built around curated connections, arriving with meetings already booked is the difference between a productive two days and an expensive one. Decide in advance which three or four organizations matter most, and request time with them before the calendar fills.
Pier 48 sits on the San Francisco waterfront near Oracle Park, a short walk from the Mission Bay and South Beach neighborhoods and reachable by Muni Metro. It is a large industrial space, which is worth knowing for anyone who runs cold in air conditioning or needs quiet for calls between sessions.
Bring a specific question rather than a general interest. The working group format rewards participants who arrive with a concrete problem — a mule network pattern that current controls miss, a data-sharing obstacle with a partner institution, a victim reimbursement policy question — because those are what the sessions are designed to work on. Teams dealing with mule account detection in particular tend to find the cross-sector room more useful than a bank-only one, because mule networks recruit on platforms banks cannot see.
Finally, consider sending someone to the free virtual stream even if a colleague attends in person. The two experiences cover different sessions well, and the cost of the second seat is zero.
How to evaluate vendors on the floor
Technology providers pay the highest ticket tier at this summit, which means the vendors present have chosen to be there deliberately. That is a reasonable filter, but it is not diligence. The questions below are worth asking at any anti-fraud or compliance stand, and they work equally well at every other conference on the fall calendar.
The last question separates automation that reduces work from automation that redistributes it. A tool that surfaces alerts faster but leaves the investigation, the evidence gathering and the write-up untouched has moved the bottleneck rather than removed it.
Sphinx approaches this by automating the analyst work that follows an alert — gathering evidence, assessing risk context and documenting the reasoning behind each disposition — while keeping every decision reviewable and overridable by a human.
What to do after
The summit's stated ambition is deployment, and the honest measure of a trip is whether anything gets deployed. Two habits make that more likely.
Write up the three most useful things learned within 48 hours, while the context is still intact, and address them to the person on the team who would own the change. Conference notes that stay in a notebook produce nothing; a short memo naming a specific control gap and a specific owner occasionally produces something.
Then follow up on the cross-sector contacts within two weeks. Relationships with a telecom abuse team or a platform trust and safety lead are the genuinely scarce asset from an event like this, and they decay quickly. GASA keeps its app active after the summit specifically to support this, and the organization runs a membership programme for institutions that want to stay inside the coordination effort year-round.
For teams weighing which other events to attend this season, the fall 2026 financial crime and compliance conference calendar compares this summit against the other major options on cost, audience and what each is genuinely good for.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where is the Global Anti-Scam Summit America 2026?
September 2-3, 2026, at Pier 48 in San Francisco, on McCovey Cove next to Oracle Park. A welcome drinks reception takes place at the Gotham Clubhouse on the evening of September 1 from 8pm to 10pm. The summit also runs a virtual stream for remote attendees.
How much does it cost to attend?
Pricing is tiered by sector. Regulators, policymakers, law enforcement and NGOs pay $299. Finance, telecom, social media and platform companies pay $699. Professional services and technology providers pay $1,499. Virtual attendance is free. GASA members can request complimentary tickets, group discounts are available, and organizations facing cost barriers can contact the organizers about reduced or waived fees.
Who should attend the Global Anti-Scam Summit?
Fraud and scam leads at banks and payment firms, trust and safety teams at technology platforms, telecom risk and network abuse teams, cybersecurity leaders, policy and enforcement staff, and victim-support organizations. The summit is built for cross-sector work, so it suits practitioners whose scam problem does not begin or end inside their own institution.
Is the Global Anti-Scam Summit worth attending for a bank compliance team?
It is valuable for teams working on scams, authorized push payment fraud or mule networks, because the programme covers the parts of the scam lifecycle that happen before money moves and includes the platforms and carriers where recruitment and contact occur. It is less relevant for teams focused primarily on sanctions screening, transaction monitoring tuning or examination readiness, which are better served by a dedicated anti-financial-crime event.
How does the America summit relate to GASA's other events?
It is one of three regional summits in GASA's 2026 series. The Europe summit took place in Lisbon on June 9-10, and the Asia summit runs in Bangkok on November 10-11. The regional editions share a format and overall mission but focus on the threat landscape, regulatory context and enforcement structures of their own region.
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