FBI: Businesses Lose $43B to Email Fraud

Fraudsters have an extensive arsenal of methods when it comes to scamming businesses.

Among the most dangerous of these tactics is business email compromise (BEC) fraud, in which bad actors pretend to be a company’s supplier and trick accounting teams into paying them instead of their actual vendors.

According to the FBI, businesses lost $43 billion to this sort of scam between 2016 and 2021, a 65% increase from the period between 2011 and 2016.

This includes 241,206 cases in the U.S., with 116,401 different victims reporting this crime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

BEC fraud is difficult to counter after the fact because it is technically a legitimate transaction, albeit one that a fraudster tricked an accountant into making. In some versions of this scheme, scammers steal employees’ personal identifiable information (PII) or tax information instead of money, which makes behavioral analytics a critical tool for mitigating further incidents of fraud that leverage this stolen data.

Another threat businesses are facing is the potential theft of biometric data. For years, proponents of biometrics have heralded it as a silver bullet for verifying identities, but scammers have begun coming up with ways to spoof these systems.

Meanwhile, consumers’ attitudes surrounding biometrics have cooled dramatically. One survey of Canadian consumers found that half were concerned that fraudsters could steal their biometric data.

Consumers also brought up additional concerns that had nothing to do with security. Forty-nine percent said they were worried about organizations misusing their biometric data, and 45% said biometrics had the potential to compromise their privacy.

Still, biometrics remain a popular verification tool despite these concerns. More than half of Canadians unlock their phones with their fingerprints, and 32% use facial recognition for the same reason. The survey also found that 14% of biometric users began leveraging these methods during the pandemic.

To learn more about what businesses are doing to combat fraud, download this month’s Monetizing Digital Intent Tracker, a PYMNTS collaboration with Neuro-ID.