Tackling your board's next big question

Fraud feels like it’s out of control. Deepfakes, massive automation, synthetic identities – the criminals are scaling, big time, and antifraud preventions are struggling to keep up. Blind spots in control cost money, reputation, and potentially the whole company. So how can CFOs keep pace with the fraud threat?

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The call seemed routine enough.

An unnamed Hong Kong-based mid-level finance worker for a UK engineering firm sat down for a video call with the company’s CFO and several high-level coworkers. The CFO wanted to move some money quickly; but because the request seemed a little odd, the finance worker had asked for a video meeting to confirm the details. And here was the CFO, live in the flesh, describing the transactions he wanted. The other execs on the call agreed that the transfers were proper.

So, with that reassurance, the finance worker authorized 15 transfers out of the company’s coffers worth $25 million.

You probably already know where this is headed… but turns out everyone on the call was an AI-generated deepfake. The mother of all scams… Oceans 11 for the TikTok era.

Fraudsters had taken publicly available video footage of the company’s executives and recreated them in AI. The only human was the finance worker who had unwittingly sent the company’s money to a criminal organization.

“The operator authorizing the transfer initially handled it appropriately, seeking verification after an unusual request, which led to the video call,” said Mason Wilder, Research Director at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). But even that step didn’t go far enough to protect the organization.

“It’s easy for someone setting up a meeting to impersonate your CFO or other colleagues,” said Wilder. “The critical parts probably missed were ‘hang up and call back’, and passcodes for the person signing off.”

This deepfake scam signals a new era of fraud. AI-empowered fraudsters are now ramping up new levels of fraud, with the power to 10X the amount of financial damage that they can do.

AI-driven frauds increased 12-fold in 2025, according to one report by PinDrop. Unfortunately, the brutal reality is that AI-enabled fraud is outpacing finance teams’ ability to respond.

“AI has fundamentally changed the speed and sophistication of fraud tactics, enabling fraudsters to pivot strategies and adapt to circumvent your controls quickly,” said Michael Ellis, CFO at insurance payments platform One Inc. “Unless you’re investing often and significantly into your controls, you can find yourself vulnerable.” 

What are CFOs doing to protect their organizations against this new fraud threat? 

Runbo Li is co-founder and finance lead at startup Magic Power AI. His story shows how fast fraud risks are growing and how quickly they endanger a business.

He said that while scaling his company to millions of users, criminals exploited his firm’s billing system with stolen credit cards and triggered chargebacks, threatening payment relationships.

“That was existential. We had days to fix it,” said Li. “What saved us was treating fraud the way a finance team should treat it: as a data problem first and a policy problem second.”

Li said that he built anomaly detection into the company's billing pipeline, allowing it to flag deviant use patterns:

“Within a week, we had rules catching over 90% of fraudulent transactions,” said Li.

The lesson for CFOs at all scales is: your defenses are only as good as your weakest point. And your weakest point could well be your data infrastructure. If your team can't query real-time transaction data and spot patterns, you're flying blind.

For Li, that means using preventative analysis to surface problems rather than waiting for quarterly audits. It also requires relying on the same technology to protect your organization as the most advanced criminals are using to target; AI.

“Fraudsters are using AI to scale,” he said. “But modern tools also give finance new superpowers, such as training models on transaction history to flag fraud more specifically than rule-based systems.”

One challenge is the sheer variety of internal and external frauds hitting businesses of all sizes. And they are increasing in volume. Here are frauds on the rise:

Edwin Ang, a regional FD for Brunel, a recruitment firm, previously worked in the food delivery industry, where customer fraud is common. 

“We had a threshold for every fraud type and its potential impact on P&L. And we had systems flagging anything suspicious, then we’d pause or shut the account immediately,” said Ang.

Having a “governance, risk and compliance” professional in the finance function was crucial. “He investigated any risks or cases, set controls and solutions, and proactively looked for lessons from other countries and companies,” added Ang.

He also recommended:

For fragmented companies that are finding that keeping up with these tasks particularly challenging, Hugo Doetsch, CFO at risk and compliance platform Optro, recommended: 

“We see gaps when it comes to fraud, even when strong controls are in place. That’s where issues start,” said Doetsch.

But going overboard on fraud prevention poses another kind of risk for finance. Finance teams are often walking a tightrope between stopping fraud and not getting in the way of legitimate sales, growth, or other operations. 

“Overcorrecting for criminal activity leads to friction and abandoned carts, suppressing topline growth, wasting customer acquisition cost and eroding lifetime value,” said Aglika Dotcheva, CFO of fraud prevention software provider Riskified. 

To prevent overcorrecting for fraud, Dotcheva recommended:

“The most effective CFOs I’ve seen use customer economics to understand how fraud decisions impact conversions, retention, and lifetime value,” said Dotcheva.

Answer your board’s next big question:

Last week’s Playbook laid out a guide for designing working capital strategies series.

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