96% of U.S. companies were targeted with at least one fraud attempt in the past year. 90% of those companies were hit with at least one successful attack, according to a new research survey of more than 260 senior finance and treasury leaders. The proprietary research by Trustpair uncovered that a rise in cyber fraud, which includes activity such as hacking, deepfakes, voice cloning and highly sophisticated phishing schemes, is driving the increase in attacks.
“Our research shows fraudsters are becoming increasingly more sophisticated in their tactics and their reach is expanding. They’re using new channels to infiltrate organizations,” says Baptiste Collot, co-founder and CEO of Trustpair. “As the risk of vendor payment fraud grows, so does the need to automate bank account validations and embed them into your daily processes. It’s essential for winning the fight against fraud and ensuring payments are sent to the correct parties.”
83% of U.S. companies saw an increase in cyber fraud attempts on their organization in the past year. Fraudsters primarily used text messages (50%), fake websites (48%), social media (37%), hacking (31%), business email compromise (BEC) scams (31%) and deepfakes (11%) to dupe organizations. CEO and CFO impersonations (44%) was the third most common type of fraud.
Key Takeaways:
- 36% of companies said the average financial loss of successful fraud attacks they experienced was more than $1M. 25% said the loss was more than $5M.
- 75% of C-level finance and treasury leaders say they’d stop doing business with an organization that fell victim to payment fraud and lost their payment. Finance and treasury leaders lose sleep over the potential of reputational damage with customers (51%), investors (50%) and suppliers and vendors (45%).
- Only 5% of companies say they can’t keep up with the growing sophistication of fraudsters and fraud attacks. Yet 90% of the companies that experienced payment fraud attempts were hit with at least one successful attack.
- 86% of all companies were hit with successful payment fraud. 67% of companies expect payment fraud to rise further in 2024 – and most aren’t prepared. Only 16% of companies regularly clean and monitor their vendor database. Just 28% verify information on the companies they work with. These gaps are surprising given scammers posing as trusted sources and the creation of false vendors (47%) and wire transfers (53%) were the two most common types of fraud in 2023.
- Companies are starting to realize the value of automation in fighting fraud. 34% of companies say they use automated account validation tools to validate vendors, compared to 17% a year ago. Yet 38% of companies say manual account validations are one of their top three challenges when it comes to fraud prevention.
