Generative AI has taken off in recent years and these tools are transforming the way organizations conduct business. While some advancements in generative AI are creating business efficiencies, several were built explicitly to assist criminals in their wrongdoing and are being used for deception.
To protect your assets and payment processes, it’s important to understand how AI fraud can threaten your business.
Tools like ChatGPT, deep fakes, voice cloning, and chatbots offer threat actors the ability to produce fabricated content that mimics executives and other authorities that make financial decisions. AI can open the door for social engineering attacks, phishing, impersonation, and many activities that can result in business payments fraud. The remarkably realistic output of these tools makes it difficult to distinguish between genuine and fraudulent actions, especially as these technologies become increasingly sophisticated over time.
The growing prominence of these technologies is troubling.
These tools generate content that appears so authentic that discerning real activities from counterfeit ones is very difficult, particularly as these technologies continue to advance. Given the swift evolution of AI, it is imperative to prioritize the security of vendor payment processes to detect and deflect these attacks. Enterprises that adopt AI solutions to proactively combat the illicit exploitation of generative AI tools will gain a strategic advantage and successfully avert the risk of business payment fraud.
ChatGPT is a very useful tool for many businesses, but its capacity for human-like interactions has raised concerns about how it can aid threat actors to commit business payment fraud. This characteristic poses a challenge for employees to distinguish between ChatGPT and actual people, which potentially exposes businesses to impersonation risks by malicious actors. Furthermore, ChatGPT can be programmed to use social engineering tactics.
The tool can initiate conversations that appear entirely legitimate, extracting sensitive information, coercing employees into unauthorized transactions, or persuading them to disclose confidential financial data. Fraudsters can leverage ChatGPT to craft convincing phishing messages that closely resemble authentic communications conveying a sense of urgency and soliciting payments or financial information. Employees may unwittingly comply, believing they are engaging with a legitimate person. What’s more, ChatGPT never sleeps and is on 24/7, which means it can enable fraudulent activities at any time, including outside standard business hours.
Deep fake technology represents a significant and evolving threat to businesses and individuals alike. These AI-driven tools have the capability to create incredibly realistic video and audio content that can deceive even the most discerning viewer or listener. While deep fake technology has garnered attention for its potential to manipulate political discourse and public figures, its implications for B2B payment fraud are equally concerning.
One of the most problematic aspects of deep fake technology is its potential use in executive fraud or business email compromise (BEC) attacks. In a typical BEC attack, a cybercriminal impersonates a high-ranking executive within an organization and instructs an employee to make an urgent payment, often to a fraudulent account. With deep fake technology, criminals can create convincing audio or video messages that appear to come from the CEO or another trusted executive. These messages can make payment requests seem legitimate, even though they are part of a fraudulent scheme.
Generative AI chatbots can also be used in business payment fraud. These tools have become incredibly skilled at creating highly convincing and deceptive content. Chatbots can mimic the way legitimate business contacts, including top executives, communicate making it nearly impossible for employees to distinguish between this type of tech and actual colleagues.
Chatbots are quite crafty at using social engineering tactics to gather sensitive information, manipulating employees into making unauthorized financial transactions or tricking them into revealing confidential data. What's more, chatbots can produce phishing messages that seem urgent and legitimate, often appearing as if they're from trusted sources. They can pretend to be high-ranking executives or important vendors, giving instructions to transfer money to fraudulent accounts. The authenticity of a chatbot message can be hard to spot using traditional methods, and they can target multiple employees at once, potentially causing significant financial losses.
The rise of digital tools and the importance of virtual assets have led to an increase in cybercrime. As AI evolves, so do resources created and used by cybercriminals.
Threat actors have become so emboldened by the strides made in AI technology that they have created their own versions of large language models (LLMs) with the explicit purpose of engaging in fraudulent and criminal activity.
One such model is WormGPT, a tool that boasts the ability to craft persuasive and clever content, demonstrating a strong potential for more successful phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.
FraudGPT is another AI tool actively sold on the dark web with no pretense of legitimacy. This model is openly advertised to benefit fraudsters, hackers, and spammers. It is touted as having no restrictions, rules, or boundaries in order to assist threat actors with their schemes.
What does this mean for your business? It’s important that your processes and tools are prepared to meet these threats head-on. Your approach towards AI, data security, and B2B payment processing should continually evolve to protect your business.
The threat of AI goes beyond payment fraud. While AI can be a powerful tool to enable increased productivity, it should be used responsibly. Here are four additional ways AI can cause issues for your business.
AI bases its recommendations and output on the data it’s been trained on, meaning businesses could get outputs that cause biases in decision-making algorithms which can lead to reputational damage and legal liabilities.
The Solution? Make sure you are continually evaluating the data your AI uses
Over reliance on AI without human oversight or intervention may result in loss of control over critical business processes, diminishing transparency and accountability.
The Solution? Use AI with human checkpoints to verify processes and accuracy while improving your overall efficiency.
Privacy concerns arise from the collection and analysis of vast amounts of sensitive data, raising ethical questions regarding data protection, consent, and surveillance.
The Solution? Don’t provide an AI system with proprietary information or sensitive data unless the AI solution is a siloed solution for your business.
AI-driven automation may exacerbate job displacement and socioeconomic inequalities in unsustainable ways. Companies may let go of crucial employees before realizing AI doesn’t have the insights, creativity, intuition, or experience needed to do the job.
The Solution? Thoughtful consideration of workforce implications and ethical frameworks is needed to ensure responsible AI deployment and mitigate unintended consequences. Determine how AI can support your team to increase productivity and not replace key contributors.
How can you avoid AI threats and payment fraud threatening your business? Make sure you are following these best practices for a secure and efficient B2B payment process.
Processes for business payments are particularly susceptible to being compromised because they are manual and have several points where threat actors can infiltrate. Use tools that automate the business payment process so there are fewer places where manual errors can occur.
Are you regularly checking invoices against goods and services to make sure your payments aren’t duplicated or going to the wrong vendors? You need real-time visibility across the entire B2B payment flow to see if anything fishy is going on.
If too many people are involved (or not enough), you can run into issues where there isn’t enough oversight from the right people in your payment cycle. Establish clear responsibilities that require more than one person to sign-off on key parts of your payment process to ensure employees can’t easily commit insider fraud or make unauthorized payments.
The rise of generative AI tools presents both opportunities and challenges for businesses. Use AI to help your business fight payment threats with fraud detection and security monitoring. Smarter B2B payment solutions utilize AI and other modern technologies to help streamline payments, secure your processes, and support stronger vendor relationships.
The development of new and advanced AI tools continues to accelerate, which is why organizations need to think about protecting their vendor payments process for the long term today. To protect against AI-driven fraud, organizations must invest in advanced technologies that can help detect and prevent fraudulent payment requests.
Trustmi’s AI-driven solution can fold into existing processes to detect suspicious signals and alert finance teams that a cyberattack is taking place. The platform flags those activities, alerts the people involved in the process, and stops payments from being released so that funds aren’t sent to the wrong place.
We’re excited to see that more businesses are embracing AI technologies like ours to combat the dark uses of these generative AI tools. Reach out to our team today to learn more about how you can stay ahead of the game and combat payment fraud.
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