CHARLOTTE, NC — The federal government’s bet on using AI to fight financial crimes appears to be paying off.  The US  treasury department said  AI helped the department sift through data and recovered billions of dollars worth of check fraud in 2024. That’s nearly triple what the treasury recovered in the previous fiscal year.  US officials quietly started using AI  to detect financial crimes in late 2022.   The treasury is not using generative AI, but machine learning.    Machine learning is the subset of AI that excels at analyzing vast amounts of data and making decisions and predictions based on what it’s learned.