In the dynamic landscape of modern business, the threat of B2B payment fraud looms large. Fraudsters aiming to exploit vulnerabilities in the business payment process will often impersonate vendors and tamper with official documents, like invoices and bank letters, to divert a company’s funds from a real vendor to a fraudulent account.  

To illustrate the ever-present danger of business payment fraud and show how hard it can be to discern a real document from a forged one, we created our Fraud or Not quiz.  Now, we're inviting you to test your skills at detecting fraud.

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Unraveling the World of Fraudulent Documents

Sometimes forged documents are obvious and can be caught immediately and flagged as fake. But with advanced AI tools and a bit of skill, a fraudster can make subtle adjustments to a document that would be imperceptible to the naked eye. They might take a real invoice and change some numbers, or adjust the placement of a signature or other copy. There's a lot at stake when a minor change can cause a payment to go to the wrong place and cost a business millions of dollars. So, how are Accounts Payable teams to know if they’re paying a fake invoice or not?

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What does “real” really mean?

The quiz features a series of invoices and bank letters, some of which are truly fraudulent and some that represent real documents. The fraudulent examples in the quiz are based on real-world cases of forged documents that our platform has detected. For the "not fraud” examples, we based these on actual documents we’ve seen from vendors but ensured that any sensitive information is completely anonymized and changed to protect their privacy and information. While we did in fact make changes to the real documents to protect vendor privacy, all the fraudulent documents in the quiz contain several glaring inconsistencies and irregularities that go beyond the bank account data or names and addresses.  Beware: while some of these issues might be obvious, others are practically unnoticeable!

The Bigger Picture  

Beyond scrutinizing individual documents for errors and red flags, this quiz prompts users to consider the following three important points:

1. How can you truly know that an invoice or bank letter is real or fake if you don’t have a real one to compare it against? If someone on an accounts payable team was given any one of these documents to review, it’s unlikely they would remember what a past invoice from an actual vendor looked like to confidently assert that the new invoice is also real. Without a side-by-side comparison, you really can't be sure if it's fraud or not. Trustmi's AI-powered platform analyzes all the past invoices and documents from each vendor so that the system knows what a real document should look like. Whenever a new invoices comes in, our platform can automatically compare it to past ones from the same vendor to see if there are anomalies and variances from the vendor’s baseline of previous invoices.

2. Even if an accounts payable professional decided to compare a newly submitted invoice from a vendor to a past invoice, would that person even have the time to do it? Perhaps if they only had a few invoices to pay a month that would be possible. But when there are hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of invoices that require payment all at once, checking each document becomes entirely unfeasible. With budgets shrinking and more work put on fewer accounts payable resources, it is unlikely that someone would have the time to compare vendor invoices and bank letters individually to confirm each one’s veracity.  Luckily, with a solution like Trustmi, finance teams don’t have to worry about spending any time inspecting and comparing invoices to make sure they are correct.  Trustmi does all the heavy lifting to detect the anomalies so that accounts payable teams don’t have to and can instead focus on their core priorities.

3. There are a number of reasons that a fraudulent invoice could still go undetected even if a human had the time and energy to compare an invoice to a past one from the same vendor. When it comes to financial documents, the devil is in the details. Fraudsters are devious and have cunning AI tools they can use to tamper with files, making changes that would go undetected by the human eye. And that is where our technology shines. In cases where a forgery is visually imperceptible, only an AI-driven solution like Trustmi can truly tell the difference by detecting all the visible and invisible indicators of compromise.

To learn more about how our technology can distinguish fraudulent documents from real ones, contact us today and let’s look at it together.

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Ready, Set, Fraud!

Ready to test your skills in identifying authentic and fraudulent documents? Take the quiz now.

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Searching for the Answers?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. For us, a picture of a fraudulent document is worth a conversation. For an in-depth analysis of each document and full explanations for each answer, get in touch and we’ll be happy to walk through the answers with you.  Let's talk!