BBVA Mexico turns fraud warnings into a game show — '¿Es Fraude?' cuts losses $9M

In Mexico, bank fraud was climbing: by May 2023 the consumer-protection agency Condusef logged a 62% year-on-year rise in transfer fraud, and the country ranked among the world's ten worst for cybercrime. Yet the standard response — security warnings in conventional formats — was so easy to skim that people missed it. BBVA México needed prevention that Mexicans would actually absorb.

TERAN TBWA's answer was to stop warning and start playing: '¿Es Fraude?' fused financial education with entertainment in five 10-minute YouTube episodes hosted by Rodrigo Murray. Contestants of different ages face simulated scams — calls, SMS, emails, fake websites, even face-to-face fraud — and must tell real bank messages from fake ones to protect the $10,000 on screen; each slip lets a character called El Defraudador take a chunk of the money. Every episode ends with prevention tips, written with BBVA's security experts.

The format turned a dry topic into culture: '¿Es Fraude?' became a national catchphrase and, in BBVA's telling, the first question people ask before acting on any suspicious contact. Measured against the prior year, fraud losses in the same quarter fell by US$9 million. The campaign then travelled through the industry's effectiveness circuit, winning two Silvers at the 2024 Effie Awards México — in Positive Social Impact and Financial Services — and the Grand Ojo Eficacia at El Ojo de Iberoamérica 2024.

The transferable move was treating the audience as players, not readers: the show makes people rehearse the detection decision under game pressure, so the lesson lands in behaviour rather than in an inbox. And because the content was built with the bank's own anti-fraud and legal teams, it carried weight a general-entertainment production could not.