Businesses today face a growing array of risks threatening their financial stability and operations. Among these, payment fraud stands out as especially critical.
Particularly as advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) give fraudsters new tools to create more sophisticated scams. From realistic deepfake voices to advanced social engineering, AI is helping criminals mimic trusted people and slip past traditional defenses. The result? Finance and treasury teams are finding themselves under siege by high-tech fraud attempts.
Fraud is on the rise – and AI is fueling it
AI has been a double-edged sword: while it powers innovation, it also supercharges fraud. Recent research highlights the growing severity of the threat. Tietoevry’s 2025 Payment Fraud Report shows that attempted digital payment fraud in Europe surged by 43% —with social manipulation scams rising 156% and phishing up 77%.
In other words, most companies will face an incident sooner rather than later. While awareness of fraud has improved slightly in recent years, many businesses remain underprepared for this new wave of AI-enhanced schemes.
Why are attacks growing more frequent and successful? AI-driven tools let criminals craft fake emails, voices, and alarmingly convincing videos. A fraudster can now synthesize a CEO's voice to authorize a fraudulent payment or generate highly realistic "urgent" invoices. These intelligent forgeries easily fool employees who aren't expecting them. Traditional detection methods—like manual verification steps or basic red-flag rules—struggle to catch scams engineered by AI. It's no surprise that industry surveys now rank cyber-attacks and data fraud among the top business risks worldwide. In short, tech-savvy criminals are staying one step ahead of outdated controls.
Not long ago, only highly skilled hackers could pull off sophisticated payment fraud. Today, advanced techniques have become commoditized. Armed with inexpensive, user-friendly toolkits available online, even less experienced criminals can acquire deepfake or malware capabilities. The barrier to entry for orchestrating a complex payment scam has never been lower.
The evolving tactics of scammers
Payment fraud no longer requires advanced hacking skills or months of planning. What once demanded technical expertise can now be executed at industrial scale with the help of AI. The tactics themselves haven't changed—phony invoices, executive impersonation, social engineering—but the accessibility has. With personal and corporate data freely available for scraping, almost anyone can launch credible attacks from anywhere, evolving fraud into a systematic risk that humans alone simply can't keep up.
One prevalent method is "whaling," where scammers target high-level executives or finance personnel with personalized deception. They might spend weeks gathering details on an executive's schedule, communication style, and authorization processes. Equipped with sophisticated tools—and plenty of time to plan—they can create a ruse that unfolds at the perfect moment. By the time they strike, an imposter request—perhaps an email that appears to come from the CFO, or a late-night phone call using an AI-cloned voice—can be indistinguishable from the real person. An unwary treasury analyst could execute a large transfer before anyone realizes the request was fake.
Scammers also exploit the fact that companies often update safeguards slowly. Simply put, criminals won’t wait for your next risk assessment or audit—they prey on security gaps right now. A few common high-tech fraud tactics include:
- Fictitious invoicing: Scammers send fake invoices that look legitimate, hoping busy accounts payable teams will pay them without scrutiny. Without strict verification controls, these invoices can slip through and be paid before anyone notices the deception.
- Executive impersonation (“CEO fraud”): Attackers pose as a CEO or CFO via email (and now even via AI-cloned voice calls) to trick staff into making urgent, unauthorized payments. These requests often arrive when the real executive is traveling or unavailable, pressuring employees to bypass regular checks.
- Sophisticated phishing: Beyond generic phishing emails, criminals use stolen data and AI to create highly targeted messages or chats that trick employees into revealing passwords or approving transactions. These personalized attacks are much harder to spot than the mass phishing attempts of the past.
- Malware and ransomware: Some hackers deploy malicious software to take over a finance officer's computer or a company's payment system. Once inside, they can quietly manipulate payment files or even lock down systems, extorting the company for access. In other cases, malware siphons off funds or sensitive data while operating undetected.
What all these ploys have in common is that they exploit human trust and process gaps. It only takes one moment of oversight or one weak control for an attacker to succeed. No one is immune, as fraud rings target everything from corporate payment networks to individual online banking users, and even government payment systems. It's no surprise so many organizations feel outmatched.
The urgent need for stronger payment controls
If it seems like scammers are moving faster than your team can react, you are not imagining it. The risk landscape has shifted dramatically, and finance leaders are struggling to keep up. Direct monetary losses from a single successful attack can reach into the millions—and that doesn't count the reputational damage or regulatory fallout.
Crucially, these dangers aren't limited to outside attackers. While this discussion has focused on external threats, many organizations also underestimate the threats from within. Internal fraud by rogue employees (and in many cases also accidental payment errors) still accounts for a significant share of losses. An unchecked staff member, for instance, could set up a fake vendor account or manipulate payment data for personal gain, such as insider schemes that can be just as damaging as external hacks if not detected. This means a holistic approach is needed—one that locks down the payment process end-to-end, catching both external scams and internal misdeeds.
In the second part of this series, we'll explore the hidden internal fraud risks in modern payment workflows and identify payment process controls proven to counter AI-enhanced fraud. For now, one thing is clear: AI is raising the stakes. Every organization should be asking, Are our payment controls working?
Watch: AI in Treasury — Useful, Risky & Already Here?
As AI reshapes both the risks and opportunities in finance, treasurers need clarity on what’s real today versus what's hype. Watch treasury and technology experts discuss how artificial intelligence is changing forecasting, fraud detection, and liquidity management — and what treasury teams should do to stay in control.
