Trust, for sale

In Thailand, early 2026, a message on familiar apps like Facebook and LINE appeared. “Sell goods online, no stock to keep, no shipping to manage, almost nothing to put down!” it said, then came the link: “Download an app called Tkshop and start earning.”

The app didn’t appear in the official stores. People installed it directly from that link, trusting the colors and layout that echoed TikTok Shop – a social commerce platform that lets users discover and buy products directly inside short videos. Inside the app, everything seemed to work as it should: orders appeared, profits climbed, and a clean dashboard tracked the money piling up, transaction after transaction.

The only problem was that every figure on that dashboard was invented.

The marketplace growth paradox

Today, every serious eCommerce business wants to be more than just a store. ECDB puts marketplaces at around 72% of global eCommerce revenue, with roughly 97% of online sales in Asia and 96% in South America running through marketplace models. In 2026, if you sell online, you either list on marketplaces or you run one.

Growth in the marketplace world depends on adding sellers fast. More sellers mean more inventory, more choice, and more reasons for customers to return. But the faster a platform lets sellers in, and the more borders it crosses, the less clearly it can see who those sellers really are. Rapid growth changes the economics of fraud: every new seller is both potential revenue and potential loss. Marketplace and eCommerce fraud runs into the tens of billions of dollars annually once you include direct losses, chargebacks, and remediation.

In the U.S., TikTok Shop – the original one, not the fraudulent app impersonating it – grew from thousands of storefronts to hundreds of thousands within about a year. Large numbers of seller registrations have been declined for failing verification, and significant volumes of counterfeit or non‑compliant listings have been removed as the platform scaled. The same speed that fueled this growth also made it easier for bad sellers to slip in, take payment, and disappear before chargebacks or refund requests could catch up.

When marketplaces grow faster than their verification, fraudsters move into the gap between how fast a platform can open the door and how carefully it can check who is walking through it.

Two kinds of fraudsters

Marketplace fraud typically falls into two patterns.

The first is visible: a seller takes money and fails to deliver. Buyers complain, chargebacks rise, and card networks and acquirers start counting chargeback ratios and dispute volumes. Under Visa and Mastercard monitoring programs, merchants that breach chargeback thresholds can be placed into “excessive chargeback” regimes, which often mean higher rolling reserves, extra monitoring, and higher fees until performance improves. The marketplace ends up funding refunds while its acquirer carries the risk, and the brand starts to feel unsafe to consumers. In one survey, nearly half of U.S. shoppers said they would not return to an online retailer after experiencing credit‑card fraud with that merchant.  

The second pattern is harder to spot. On the surface, a seller might look fine: a digital storefront, steady volume, fees paid on time. Underneath, money moves through accounts across borders, turning criminal funds into what looks like everyday revenue. Money laundering, in other words.

Fraud tends to cluster where verification is weakest: individual sellers, cross‑border flows, and digital goods. Juniper Research expects fraudulent digital goods transactions to rise from around 10.4 billion dollars in 2025 to roughly 27 billion dollars - a jump of roughly 160%, outpacing physical‑goods fraud because instant delivery leaves almost no time to intervene. LexisNexis estimates that every dollar of fraud ultimately costs businesses about 4.61 dollars once chargebacks, fees, operational overhead, and remediation are counted.

The cheapest fraud to deal with is the seller you never onboard. But that creates its own trade‑off: you still need enough good sellers to grow.

Matching the check to the risk

Marketplaces often frame verification as a trade‑off: either slow growth to protect yourself, or accept more risk so you can grow. In reality, the answer is proportionate verification, matching the depth and timing of checks to the risk a seller presents, which is the principle behind Nuvei for Platforms.

Nuvei gives marketplaces, commerce platforms, gig‑economy businesses, payment facilitators, and SaaS vendors one layer that handles seller onboarding and KYC, pay‑ins, split payments, payouts, fraud prevention, and risk management. No seller receives funds until their required checks have cleared, because verification is wired directly into the payout.

The system runs on tiered KYC, tied to clear thresholds determined by the risk level of the marketplace. For low-risk sellers up to a low initial volume threshold, we may only require a name and bank account. As volume grows into a mid-tier range, the seller must also prove they own that bank account. Beyond that, and for business or higher-risk categories from the start, full ID and business documentation are required. The marketplace's vertical, product type, transaction amount, and country risk all feed into which tier applies. Renting out a campsite in one country, for example, is easier to verify than selling digital downloads or running fundraising campaigns across many.

Behind the interface, Nuvei screens sellers against sanctions lists and public registers, verifies identities, and uses AI‑based document checks to spot tampering, with human compliance teams reviewing what the tools flag. Fraudulent documents are common and often well‑made, so combining automation and human review keeps the process fast and reliable without asking for more paperwork than needed.

The controls do not stop once a seller is in. Ongoing monitoring checks whether sellers still offer what they claimed to, and whether their behavior stays within expected patterns.  

In practice, this keeps payouts clean, cuts disputes and chargebacks, and satisfies regulators, without turning onboarding into a wall. Growth and security stop being a trade‑off.

Whoever moves the money owns the risk

Payments, by definition, assign liability. When a marketplace collects payments for a seller, the acquirer carries direct risk. If that seller runs off with the money, collapses under chargebacks, or turns out to be fraudulent, the payment chain must still make buyers whole.

When a marketplace pays money out, the transaction risk on the funds is smaller – the money was already collected – but the compliance risk is serious. Pay the wrong party and you may have helped move criminal money. That is how licenses get revoked, not just fined. In 2025, for example, New York’s financial regulator fined Block, the owner of Cash App, 40 million dollars and imposed an independent monitor after finding “significant deficiencies” in its AML and KYC controls.  

Whether the money is coming in or going out, whoever moves it inherits the risk. That shifts onboarding out of the back office and into the center of the marketplace business model. Effective verification is the control that keeps revenue real, keeps disputes within reason, and keeps the platform’s name intact when something breaks. A platform that takes onboarding seriously is deciding which revenue it is willing to own.

The EU's Digital Services Act is starting to codify this, with Article 30 pushing more marketplaces toward pre‑trade seller verification, including identity and payment‑account checks. Anonymous or weakly verified sellers create outsized risk for everyone in the transaction, so strong seller onboarding is becoming a regulatory baseline.

This brings us back to Tkshop

When victims of the Tkshop scam in early‑2026 Thailand tried to withdraw their earnings, the app froze and demanded more money to release the balance. Then more again. Each new payment was framed as a necessary step, a fee, a penalty, a compliance check.

The scheme held until February 2026, when police raided nine sites, arrested four suspects, and seized assets worth more than 114 million baht. At least 88 victims had been identified, with losses exceeding 25 million baht. The real TikTok Shop was never involved. Its name was simply the bait.

What made the scheme work was not just the software. It was the moment, early on, when users accepted that they were dealing with a legitimate seller, one who looked like they belonged in a marketplace. For a marketplace, the lesson is the same: by the time a payment happens, the trust decision has already been made. Checkout does not create trust; it reveals whether it was placed in the right hands.

As eCommerce evolves into more sophisticated forms, like agentic commerce, marketplaces will have to prove not only who the seller is, but that the agent is authorized to act for them, and that its behavior over time matches what a legitimate seller should do. Transaction monitoring and “normal” patterns will need to adjust for actors that operate at machine speed and odd hours. Agents won’t replace onboarding; they will make continuous verification – identity, authorization, and behavior – the next frontier of marketplace trust.

But regardless of what eCommerce will look like in the future, the idea holds: checkout is where trust gets spent. Onboarding is where it gets earned.

For marketplaces building or scaling today, that means asking which sellers you are willing to own, which risks you refuse to underwrite, and which parts of that work you want a specialist like Nuvei to handle so your teams can focus on growth, not chasing the next Tkshop.