Forced to work from home during COVID-19, accounts payable departments have accelerated plans to move away from paper checks and pay more of their suppliers by ACH. That, in turn, accelerated another trend: fraud. Through social engineering, fraud attacks on ACH credits are most commonly known as Business Email Compromises or BECs.
According to the 2020 AFP Payments and Fraud Control Survey Report, for the first time, in 2019, BEC schemes were the most common type of fraud attack experienced, with 75 percent of organizations experiencing an attack and 54 percent of those reporting financial losses. ACH credits—outgoing payments from buyer to supplier—were targeted in 37 percent of BEC schemes.