What Is AI-Aided Fraud in Finance and How Can Businesses Avoid It?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how business fraud happens by making scams easier to scale, harder to detect, and likely even costlier to fight.

As of 2026, AI research firm Feedzai estimates that over half of all fraud being perpetuated involves the use of AI technology. As adoption continues to ramp up, that number will rise, and Deloitte believes businesses will lose upwards of $40 billion thanks to AI-aided fraud schemes in 2027. Risk is increasing for businesses of all sizes, and as Bottomline’s Katie Elliott, Senior Risk and Fraud Officer for the Paymode network, said "It's the same kind of fraud, just on AI steroids.”

Regardless of your role, industry, or depth of fraud exposure, AI-enabled fraud prevention needs to be top of mind. In this article, you’ll learn what kinds of AI-aided fraud to look for, how reduced cost and easier access is helping fraudsters get ahead, and what practical steps you can take to reduce your exposure.

 

What Is AI-Aided Fraud?

The same tried-and-true fraud schemes like Business Email Compromise and deepfakes are being paired with artificial intelligence to make the attacks more convincing and easier to scale. Instead of relying on crude phishing emails or blatantly fake invoices, bad actors are using AI to:

• Mimic real peoples’ voices, writing styles, and even faces
• Generate extremely realistic documents, including invoices and website login pages
• Steal login credentials and account information and use them to intercept payments and sensitive information
• Analyze stolen data to find new targets and vulnerabilities

Much of this is not new, but it is far more powerful. That’s adding more risk for businesses and banks, who must take steps to protect their data and payments.

 

Why AI Has Changed the Fraud Landscape

In the past, there were two major constraints on fraudsters: a lack of acumen and an inability to scale their efforts. Fraudsters with limited data to work with, poor grammar, and generic messaging could only convince a tiny percentage of targets that they were legitimate. While they could mass email targets and use social media to their advantage, they still couldn’t put together convincing messages or target the exact right personas, so their impact was limited.

AI has removed these constraints. AI-aided writing has helped fraudsters write more convincingly, and has helped them not set off traditional alarm bells.

How AI Is Creating New Forms of Fraud and Supercharging Old Schemes

To know how to fight AI-aided fraud, you first need to know what to look for. The following is a high-level look at some of the most dangerous new schemes and the way AI is making old fraud plays more believable.

 

Deepfakes and Voice Phishing (Vishing)

AI can now convincingly replicate faces, voices, and speech patterns; unnatural lighting, video glitches, and unfamiliar phrasing may be the only tells. Fraudsters impersonating CFOs and other high-level executives can urge an employee to make a payment to a new account, leveraging the power of that position to make the employee feel rushed and pressured. By the time the request is questioned, the funds may already be gone.

 

IT Impersonation and Credential Theft

AI-driven impersonation has moved beyond email and into real-time messaging channels. A suspicious email from IT may or may not set off alarm bells, but a message ostensibly from a member of the IT team in a messaging system like Slack or Microsoft Teams seems more plausible. By warning of a security issue and asking an employee to log in through a secure portal, or to change their credentials by clicking a link, fraudsters can take advantage of the trust employees place in their trusted collaboration tools and teams.

 

AI-Created Invoices

It is now possible for bad actors to generate invoices that are nearly indistinguishable from legitimate ones, right down to vendor names, purchase amounts, and dollar values. Fraudsters who have access to vendor systems can spoof an invoice almost exactly, and even those that don’t can still deceive with very convincing invoices that pass muster at a glance. Because everything seems legitimate, businesses may not realize the invoice was AI-generated and may pay into a fraudulent bank account before even realizing there was an issue.

 

How AI Is Making Traditional Fraud Harder to Detect

AI is enabling new scams, but it’s also strengthening schemes that fraudsters have relied on for years.

 

Account Takeovers

It’s easier for a fraudster to take control of critical and sensitive accounts than it ever was before, and AI is a major reason. Optimized phishing messages, convincing fake login pages that look identical to the real thing, and better intelligence to identify users who might fall for these scams combine to give fraudsters a better chance of accessing accounts.

Once credentials are stolen, bad actors can move nearly invisibly through accounts, requiring advanced monitoring of user account location, device, and behavior to prevent infiltration.

 

Business Email Compromise (BEC)

A fraudulent email could often be spotted before AI thanks to poor grammar, unfamiliar phrasing, generic messaging, and a lack of research into the recipient. Today’s readily available AI, however, has allowed fraudsters to polish, personalize, and optimize those messages in a way that makes BEC harder to detect and more effective. Businesses lost $2.8 billion to BEC last year, per the FBI’s Internet Crime Center, and that problem is worsening as sophistication increases.

 

Insider Fraud

AI can increase insider risk by accidentally surfacing sensitive information from internal systems, helping users bypass traditional controls, or enabling unscrupulous employees to conduct internal deepfakes and impersonation. The access to sensitive data and systems is a particularly fraught problem - Bottomline found that 28% of organizations occasionally or frequently experience insider fraud incidents.

 

What Businesses Should Know About AI-Aided Fraud and How to Fight Back

Whether the schemes are new or old, AI is helping fraudsters to craft more believable, less detectable, and more dangerous campaigns. AI-aided fraud is widespread, evolving and metastasizing rapidly, and becoming more effective.

Because fraudsters only need a small success rate at a large scale to profit, and because AI enables that scale, organizations must protect themselves.

There is no single solution or salve for any kind of fraud, especially not fraud schemes augmented by AI. A layered approach that employs technology, expertise, and savvy gives organizations the best possible chance to spot these types of fraud and prevent them.

 

Use AI to Detect AI

Right now, AI cannot effectively and autonomously fight fraud. Instead, you should be using AI to assist you to:

• Analyze large volumes of transactions in real time
• Show anomalies and suspicious patterns
• Prioritize alerts for human review

Because of its ability to analyze data quickly and identify unexpected trends and red flags, AI is a powerful fraud prevention tool. However, AI should only augment and not replace human judgement. Employees remain essential for high-risk decisions, sensitive accounts and data, and payments.

 

Strengthen Payment and Account Controls

Whether or not you deploy AI, proven controls remain one of the most effective ways to stop fraudsters. Be sure your organization is using:

• Multi-factor authentication
• Dual approvals for payments and account changes
• Multiple methods to confirm new vendor enrollments and changes
• Continuous monitoring

AI can enhance these controls—particularly verification and monitoring. But it should be just one of the layers of security you’re using. If fraudsters can get past one of your defenses only to be met with another and then another, it greatly decreases the likelihood of a successful attack.

 

Allow Employees to Slow Down

Technology alone cannot stop fraud. Employees remain the most important line of defense against fraud, because they are often the vectors for it.

Effective training helps employees:

• Recognize deepfakes and impersonation attempts
• Question urgent or unusual requests
• Know when and how to escalate concerns

Train employees, encourage them to use their best judgement, and make it clear that an employee who slows down to verify a suspicious request won’t be punished for doing so. Savvy employees can save your business from significant financial and reputational damage.

 

Partner with Fraud Prevention Experts

If your company does not have in-house AI fraud prevention capabilities, fraud prevention experts, or other tools to shut the door on AI-aided scams, then it’s best to seek partnerships from companies who specialize in those items.

A business payments network can be especially helpful if it has secure vendor enrollment, monitoring, and other built-in tools to fight AI-aided fraud.

There is no way to be sure what new schemes or new tactics will come as fraudsters lean more heavily on AI. Organizations must be aware of the tactics out there, take steps to secure themselves that will be universally effective against any kind of fraud, and ensure employees and procedures are aligned against the misuse of AI.