Case Study: Walmart achieves near-real-time fraud detection and recovery, averting millions with Alteryx

Leveraging Alteryx to Identify and Mitigate Fraud

Walmart Global Investigations faced a nationwide social‑engineering fraud scheme in which bad actors were loading high‑value gift cards at Walmart and Sam’s Club registers without tendering payment, causing significant shortages and financial loss. The team needed a repeatable, near‑real‑time way to identify high‑risk transactions, stop ongoing fraud, and recover funds before perpetrators profited.

Using Alteryx Designer and Gallery, analysts built an automated workflow that pulls and blends transactional data from multiple databases, flags back‑to‑back high‑value loads by the same operator/register, enriches results with MSA geodata, and checks card balances via dynamic queries. The cleaned data is pushed every 15 minutes to a Tableau dashboard (including mobile), enabling immediate investigation and recovery actions; the program has saved analysts time, scaled to other fraud scenarios, and helped recover millions of dollars for affected stores.

Walmart

Scott Peacock

Director, Analytics & Insight