According to a survey commissioned by OP Financial Group, about 69% of businesses reported that developments in artificial intelligence have made scam attempts so believable that detecting them is becoming increasingly difficult.
The Corporate Pulse survey also showed that nearly one in three businesses operating in Finland with a turnover of at least 200 million euros reported that they have been targeted by payment and invoice fraud attempts at an increasing rate during the last 12 months, said OP in a press release on Friday.
”AI, cyber threats and geopolitical instability have transformed the risk landscape of companies. In response, companies are making an effort to strengthen both technical and organisational safeguards,” said Antti Karhu, Head of Technology and Data of OP Corporate Bank.
Typical scams that target businesses include CEO fraud, salary payment fraud and the phishing of employees’ Office login credentials or personal banking user identifiers.
If scammers are able to gain access to a company’s accounts using the credentials of a key employee or authorised account user, significant sums can be at risk.
Whereas in the past, scammers could often be exposed by poor spelling or inconsistencies in their story, modern scams are very convincing.
”The most important thing in preventing payment fraud attempts is that the company has a secure and controlled financial process. When the process is in order and followed to the letter, criminals have an extremely hard time succeeding in their attempts,” Karhu said.
The Finnish police reported cases of CEO fraud where Finnish companies have ended up losing up to hundreds of thousands of euros. Elsewhere in the world, scammers have succeeded in stealing as much as tens of millions of euros through deepfake scams created using AI.