An unstable economy is rife with fraud. Perpetrated on customers, it ranges from employees’ internal abuse to large fraud via high-value contracts cum control breaches that impose serious consequences to biz. Loyal employees may not perpetrate fraud if not for societal pressures and economic recession with its rationalization that they have bills to pay and children to feed. Thus, the need for financial institutions to embark on effective measures via schemes that will aids both fraud prevention and detection. Study proposes genetic algorithm trained neural net model to accurately classify credit card transactions. Compared, model used a rule-based system to provide it with start-up solution and it has a fraud catching rate of 91% with a consequent, false alarm rate of 9%. Its convergence time is found to depend on how close the initial solution space is to the fitness function, and for recombination and mutation rates applied.