According to a new report by Trustpair, cyber fraud (deepfakes, hacking, phishing, voice cloning, etc.) rose by 14% year over year (YoY). The report also found that 90% of U.S. companies were targeted by cyber fraud in the past year, compared to 79% of companies in 2023. The surge in fraud is largely driven by fraudsters’ rapid adoption of AI. In 2024, the use of generative AI tactics such as deepfakes and deepaudio increased by 118%. 

Business email compromise (BEC) and imposter email scams (63%) are now the top approach fraudsters are using against organizations, up 103% YoY. This is a shift from 2023 when text messages were the most commonly used approach (50%). 

Nearly 60% of companies said the financial impact of payment fraud they experienced in 2024 was more than $5M compared to just a quarter who said this the year prior, which is a 136% increase. Twenty percent said the impact was above $25M. 

Outside of financial losses, the reputational impact with customers (53%), investors (49%), and vendors and suppliers (48%) is what keeps most executives up at night. 

Sixty-nine percent of companies say they were targeted by this type of fraud in 2024, up from 47% who said this a year ago. Vendor fraud and wire transfer fraud (63%) are the top two fraud types companies were targeted by — and the two types of fraud companies say they are least prepared to deal with. 

Only 9% of executives said fraud prevention should be the responsibility of multiple departments. Less than half say they have segregation of duties in place across teams involved in payments (45%) or that they collaborate across procurement, AP, finance, treasury and IT (47%). 

Nearly 70% still use manual methods, such as human callbacks or emails, to handle bank account validations, which risks payments being sent to the wrong party. Only 31% use an automated account validation tool and just 8% check supplier credentials across all stages of the procurement process. 

Almost half (43%) of companies have invested in fraud awareness training over the past 12 months, which is an important step, but training and policies only go so far. In fact, companies said one of their biggest challenges in fraud prevention is that employees don’t always follow fraud prevention policies (39%). 

Read the report.