#fraud-detection
Fraud Detection
Identify and prevent financial fraud with monitoring and controls
AI-Generated Receipts Are Now Most of Expense Fraud: How to Protect Your Small Business
AI-generated fake receipts rose from 0% to 70.8% of detected expense fraud in fourteen months, averaging $101 per claim, and small businesses can counter it by matching receipts to actual transaction records instead of judging document appearance.
Employee Dishonesty Insurance and Fidelity Bonds: What They Cover and What They Don't
A fidelity bond (employee dishonesty insurance) covers employee theft, forged checks, and payroll fraud that general liability and property policies exclude, and it's legally required for anyone handling a 401(k) plan's assets under ERISA.
Nacha's 2026 ACH Fraud Monitoring Rule: What Every Business Must Do
Nacha's Phase 2 ACH fraud monitoring rule took effect June 19, 2026, requiring nearly every business that originates ACH payments to run a documented, risk-based fraud monitoring process covering account ownership verification, change monitoring, anomaly detection, and audit trails.
AI-Powered Fraud Detection for Small Businesses: Real-Time Auditing Without a Big-Four Budget
Business email compromise cost U.S. companies over $3 billion in 2025, averaging $137,000 per incident — and 45% of small businesses hit by BEC close within six months. AI-driven continuous auditing now starts around $20–$70/month; here's how anomaly detection, vendor account validation, and free controls like payment-change callbacks cut the risk without an enterprise fraud stack.
Check Fraud Is Still the #1 Payment Threat in 2026 — Here's What to Do About It
The 2026 AFP Payments Fraud Survey found 76% of U.S. organizations faced payment fraud in 2025, with paper checks the top target at 58% — ahead of ACH debits (30%) and wires (25%). Here's a practical small-business defense checklist, from Positive Pay and ACH filters to callback verification and weekly reconciliation.
AI-Generated Fake Invoices Are Fooling Accounts Payable Teams — Here's How to Stop Them
Generative AI made vendor impersonation cheap: 76% of organizations faced payments fraud in 2025, and AI-generated fakes now drive 70.8% of expense-report fraud. Here are the controls that still work — out-of-band verification, dual authorization, vendor-file hygiene, and auditable books.
How a Trailer Manufacturer's Bankruptcy Shows What Happens When Nobody Is Watching the Books
A Georgia trailer manufacturer's 2026 Chapter 11 filing traces partly to alleged employee theft discovered in 2024. Businesses under 100 employees suffer a median fraud loss of $141,000 per ACFE data — here are the segregation-of-duties controls that catch theft early, and why an auditable ledger matters.
Ghost Employee Fraud: How Fake Payroll Records Drain Small Businesses and the Controls That Catch Them
Ghost employee schemes cost U.S. businesses an estimated $400 billion a year and run a median of 18–30 months before detection. Learn the three common scheme patterns, the red flags already in your payroll data — duplicate bank accounts, unchanged withholding, missing I-9s — and the segregation-of-duties controls that stop them.
IRS Dirty Dozen 2026: How Payroll Phishing and Direct-Deposit Scams Target Small Businesses
The IRS's 2026 Dirty Dozen list flags a payroll-specific phishing wave: fake HR portal emails and direct-deposit change requests that reroute paychecks to scammers. The FBI's IC3 logged 24,768 business email compromise complaints totaling roughly $3.05 billion in 2025, with 86% of losses moving by wire or ACH — the same rails payroll runs on. Here are the three warning signs (urgency, unusual requests, process changes), five process controls that close the email-only loophole, and the first-72-hours response if a paycheck has already been diverted.
AI-Generated Fake Receipts Now Drive Most Expense Fraud: A Small Business Guide
AI-generated receipts jumped from 0% to 70.8% of fraud flags between March 2025 and May 2026, per AppZen data covering 1,471 fake receipts across 174 companies — and the average claim dropped to $101 as fraudsters shifted from a few large fakes to many small ones under auto-approval thresholds.
Chase's New Passkey and Trusted Contact Features: A Small Business Security Guide
Chase rolled out passkey login and a Trusted Contact Person feature in early 2026 to counter AI voice-cloning fraud, which costs small businesses $30,000 to $400,000 per incident on average.
Financial Scams Targeting Small Businesses: The Warning Signs Before the Wire Goes Out
The FBI's IC3 logged $3.05 billion in business email compromise losses in 2025, and only 25% of small businesses have a whistleblower reporting mechanism versus 85% of large companies — here's how vendor impersonation, payroll diversion, and check fraud unfold, and the controls that stop them before a wire goes out.