A new report from invoice automation company Basware has revealed that organisations are severely underprepared for the influx of AI fraud that is expected to surge in the coming years.
Basware’s ‘The Rise in AP Fraud’ report, conducted by sharedserviceslink, surveyed 100 global business leaders and CFOs and asked them what financial fraud measures they had in place when it pertains to mitigating AI fraud, such as deepfakes.
The report revealed that a damning 90% of organisations admitted that they lack the technology and infrastructure needed to combat AI fraud citing lack of talent, shared responsibilities taking up too much manual time and other resources unavailable.
Furthermore, two thirds (62%) of businesses believe that AI has been used and is a key driver of invoice fraud. This increase in difficulty to prevent this vastly growing type of fraud has made it more difficult for invoice companies to decipher between legitimate and fraudulent documents as AI only becomes more sophisticated.
Fraud is becoming increasingly frequent, sophisticated, and damaging for businesses. In 2024, seven out of 10 organisations (68%) reported fraud attempts, with 62% noting these attempts had worsened over the past year.
The financial impact is staggering, according to Basware as last year, fraud schemes, including bank fraud, resulted in global losses of $485bn.
Tom Santacroce, Global VP of AP Assurance, commented on the findings: “Manual processes are inherently slow and prone to errors, making it difficult to match invoices, track approvals, or identify duplicate payments – creating exploitable gaps for fraudsters, who are now using GenAI.
“For overburdened AP teams, these create the perfect storm of challenges, leading to operational bottlenecks, strained supplier relationships, and lost cash flow.”
AI fraud is becoming an increasingly common and growing threat to not only smaller financial companies, but also largescale entities, such as Google and Microsoft.
The two aforementioned tech giants have in response invested heavily into AI to not only benefit from the customer-facing benefits it can provide, but also be deployed to fight AI with AI.
According to Basware’s findings, remote work and decentralised operations are some of the main contributors towards AI invoice fraud. 25% of respondents stated that these two factors contributed to the rise in AI fraud the most, causing weakened internal controls as remote work exposes accounts payable departments to greater vulnerabilities.
There is also the increased sophistication of deepfakes involving imitated voices, images and personal information, which has been significantly enhanced by the developments of GenAI falling into the wronghands.
As a result of deepfake fraud, 62% of businesses believe that GenAI is the key driver of this type of fraud, which has seen a man from Lithuania defraud Google and Facebook out of $120m posing as a legitimate supplier using deepfake voices to bypass highly secure safeguards.
“Forward-thinking organizations are reimagining fraud, overpayment and risk prevention through AI and automation that protects against increasingly complex financial threats,” continued Santacroce.
“Remote work has weakened traditional security, requiring secure systems and innovative solutions like decentralized finance and blockchain for transparent vendor transactions.
“With increasingly sophisticated fraud tactics on the uptick, organizations must prepare for stricter AI and compliance rules. Proactive fraud prevention today not only mitigates risk, but also future-proofs operations against costly penalties.”
