It’s not just consumers who are getting tricked into shelling out money to cybercriminals — middle market businesses on average are losing almost $300,000 annually to invoice fraud, according to a recent survey by Saas firm Medius and Censuswide.
“Invoice fraud is something that’s happening all the time but people don’t talk about it because it’s embarrassing, it hurts their brands and it hurts their supplier relationships,” Branden Jenkins, chief operating officer at Sweden-based Medius, said in an interview. “It is a rampant problem.”
It’s a crime that hits all-sized companies. In 2019 a Lithuanian man pleaded guilty to U.S. charges of helping defraud the company now known as Meta and Alphabet’s Google out of more than $100 million by posing as a hardware vendor and claiming the company owed them money in what is sometimes known as a “business email compromise,” according to a March 20, 2019 Reuters report.
Many finance executives aren’t clear of the extent of the problem, according to the Medius survey of 2,750 finance executives in North America, Europe and Asia. The study found that one in four or 25% of finance executives surveyed were unable to estimate how much invoice fraud was costing their businesses, even though last year the study found that on average, finance teams spotted 12 cases of this kind of fraud.
As businesses and their finance teams move increasingly to…
