Published August 26, 2025
How Arkose’s Kevin Gosschalk Faces Down Scammers
Kevin Gosschalk knows that criminals and legitimate businesses have the same goal: to make money. The Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Arkose Labs, he also understands that both sides are using the latest and most sophisticated tools to do it.
“What is the best way to use the lowest investment to make the highest return on that investment?” he asked at a recent conference. Like “real” firms, he said, scammers are “using all the techniques you can think of, they’re trying all different things, and of course the latest flavor is Generative AI and AI technology.”
If it’s merely the latest digital scourge that Gosschalk has faced in his nearly 10 years leading Arkose Labs, it’s certainly the most formidable challenge yet. Unlike standard businesses, he said, “criminals have the advantage of no regulation, no policies, no privacy requirements. They can use whatever they want, whenever they want.” Free from these constraints, “they’re actually about two years ahead of most companies when it comes to using things like Generative AI.”
Arkose’s goal is to close that gap, which is harder than it sounds. AI technology can allow fraudsters to create convincing new identities, which they can use for months, or even years, to draw in victims. They’ll go to great lengths if there’s a big enough payday; Gosschalk said that in some “pig butchering” scams, they’ll even wire their targets thousands of dollars if they think there’s a bigger payoff down the road.
Gosschalk has gone to great lengths to stop them, literally and figuratively. An Australian native, he attended the University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology before founding SwipeAds, an ad fraud prevention business, in 2013. Using his background in video game development and machine vision technology, he has embraced the practice of applying dynamic, user-friendly puzzles in the authentication process to help weed out would-be scammers.
But there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to cybersecurity, which is why he founded Arkose Labs in 2016, and why he remains on the front lines of the forever war against ill-intentioned enterprises. Levels of fraud are chronically underreported but are nonetheless on the rise. Gosschalk’s targets are “very adversarial” and share their tips with each other: “It’s not like we stopped this group, so we’re okay,” he said. “It is a very unfair advantage in criminals’ favor.”
Our advantages are few. But Arkose Labs, and Gosschalk, are among the strongest.
Read the original article here.
