The article explores the evolution and current landscape of fraud detection, highlighting the transition from traditional rules-based systems to advanced machine learning (ML) techniques. It traces the history of fraud back to ancient Greece with the story of Hegestratos and describes how modern financial institutions now face similar challenges but with significantly more data due to online transactions. The text details the process of building an ML-powered fraud detection system, emphasizing the importance of balancing false positives and false negatives to optimize the system's performance. The article also outlines the use of precision-recall curves to evaluate model efficacy in imbalanced datasets and discusses the practical application of these models in real-world scenarios, using various Python libraries and Comet for experiments and model tracking. It encourages hands-on learning through shared Colab Notebooks and emphasizes the art and science of machine learning in developing effective fraud detection systems.