CEO Fraud Prevention for Finance and Accounts-Payable Teams

An email from the CEO, or a call in a voice you recognize, asks you to push a payment through today because a deal is closing and it has to stay quiet. The account is new, the amount is large, and the tone makes clear that delay is not welcome. The request feels legitimate because the attacker copied the signals finance associates with executive authority.

CEO fraud does not break into your systems. It asks a person in finance to move money, and it dresses the ask in authority, urgency, and secrecy so the normal checks feel like obstacles. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 24,768 business email compromise complaints and about $3.05 billion in reported losses in the United States in 2025. Those losses land on the finance and accounts-payable teams who process payments, because the payment is the last reversible step before the money is gone.

Payment-workflow controls can stop a convincing impersonation before the money leaves, without depending on anyone’s ability to spot a fake.

What You’ll Learn

• Which incoming requests should always trigger independent verification before any money moves.
• How to run callback verification and dual authorization so they actually work, instead of rubber-stamping the same fraudulent message twice.
• How to lock down the two workflows fraud targets most: vendor bank-detail changes and first-time or unusual wires.
• Clear rules for invoice fraud and gift-card requests, so staff are not left to judge them in the moment.
• What your finance team should do in the first hour after a suspected fraudulent payment.

Why Finance and Accounts Payable Are the Front Line

CEO fraud is aimed at the people who can move money, which means the target is rarely the CEO. It is the accounts-payable clerk, the controller, the treasury analyst, or whoever can initiate a wire or edit a vendor’s bank record. Attackers study who holds that access and then impersonate the authority above them.

The impersonation arrives through whatever channel works. Often it is a spoofed or look-alike email. Sometimes it is a genuine but compromised mailbox belonging to an executive or a supplier, which is why it passes every technical check. Increasingly it is backed by a phone call in a cloned voice or a text that continues the story. All of these are forms of business email compromise, and treating them as one problem keeps the defense simple: the channel does not matter, the requested action does.

Every control in this guide supports one rule:

Verify the action, the authority, and the account through an independent channel you already trust, before any money or master-data change goes through. A familiar name, a known voice, a live video face, a matching caller ID, or a reply landing in the same email thread all show you presentation, not proof. None of them authorizes a payment.

The rule shifts the defense away from whether a busy person under pressure can tell a real request from a fake one. It puts the decision in a procedure that can hold under pressure.

The Requests That Must Always Trigger Verification

Most payments are routine and should stay that way. Verification exists for the handful of requests fraud actually relies on, and only those need to be routed through it. Train your team to stop on any of the following, regardless of who appears to be asking:

Trigger	Why it’s high-risk	Required action
New or changed vendor bank details	The single most abused workflow; redirects real payments to the attacker	Independent callback to a known contact, plus second-person approval
First-time or unusually large beneficiary	No payment history to compare against	New-beneficiary hold and dual authorization
Urgent, confidential, or “keep this quiet” payments	Secrecy and urgency exist to bypass normal checks	Verify anyway; treat the demand for secrecy as a warning sign in itself
Invoice changes to amount, remit-to, or bank account	Small edits redirect funds while the invoice looks familiar	Match to PO and confirm the change out of band
Gift-card or prepaid-card requests	Irreversible, untraceable, never a legitimate corporate payment	Refuse under a standing policy (see below)
Payroll or direct-deposit changes	Diverts salary to attacker-controlled accounts	Verify with the employee through a known channel

Each trigger creates an opportunity to redirect money or the instructions that move it.

Callback Verification That Actually Works

Callback verification is the core control, and casual implementations fail in predictable ways.

Call the requester back on a number you already hold from your own records or vendor master file. Never use the phone number, email address, or “confirmation” contact supplied in the request itself, because an attacker controls everything inside the message. If the only contact detail you have came with the request, you have not verified anything.

Have a second person place or witness the call whenever the payment is material. Confirm the specifics out loud: the exact amount, the beneficiary, and the account. A vague “yes, that’s fine” is not confirmation; you are checking that the real person actually intended this exact transaction.

Record the outcome. Note who verified, when, the number called, and what was confirmed. That record is both your control evidence and the timeline you will need if anything later goes wrong.

Handle exceptions by defaulting to delay. If you cannot reach the requester on a known channel, the payment waits. A genuine executive or supplier will accept a short hold; only a fraudster cannot survive one. Give staff explicit permission to hold a payment even when the apparent requester is the CEO, and make clear that no one will be blamed for it.

A private challenge question can add a layer, as when a Ferrari executive reportedly stopped an attempted cloned-voice impersonation of the company’s CEO by asking something only the real person could answer. Treat it as a supplement to known-channel callback. A static shared secret can be phished or overheard, so it strengthens the procedure without replacing it.

Locking Down Vendor Bank-Detail Changes

If you harden one workflow, make it this one. A request to change a vendor’s bank account is the highest-value move an attacker can make, because it quietly redirects payments you were always going to send. In 2019 a Toyota Boshoku subsidiary reportedly transferred more than $37 million after staff were convinced to change banking details on an electronic funds transfer. The invoices were expected; only the destination account was wrong.

Treat every bank-detail change as unverified until an independent callback to a known vendor contact confirms it. The request may arrive from the supplier’s real but compromised mailbox, so the sender looking legitimate proves nothing. Confirm the change with a person you can reach at a number already on file.

Require second-person approval for any edit to the vendor master file, separate from whoever processes payments. The master file is where a single fraudulent change turns into a stream of misdirected payments, so it deserves its own control.

Hold payments to a newly changed account through at least one full cycle, and consider a small test payment the vendor confirms receiving before releasing a large one. After you make the change, notify the vendor at their known contact that their banking details were updated. If the change was fraudulent, that message reaches the real supplier and can surface the fraud before the next invoice is paid.

Payment Authorization Controls

Verification confirms a request is real. Authorization controls make sure no single person or single message can move money on its own.

Separate duties so the person who requests a payment is not the person who approves it, and neither is the person who sets up the beneficiary. When those roles collapse into one seat, one compromised account or one deceived employee is enough.

Require dual authorization on payments above a defined threshold, and be precise about what “dual” means. Two approvers clicking through the same fraudulent email is a single point of failure wearing a second signature. Dual authorization works only when each approver verifies through an independent channel: one confirms the request, the other confirms the account against source records or a separate callback. Independence is the control, not the second click.

Set transaction thresholds that match your risk, and apply tighter handling as amounts rise. Put a hold or cooling-off period on first-time beneficiaries so a brand-new account cannot receive a large payment the same hour it appears. The delay costs a legitimate vendor very little and removes the speed an attacker needs.

Lean on the tools your bank already offers. Positive pay and payee-name matching catch altered checks and mismatched account names. Out-of-band payment confirmation and dual-control release on the banking platform add a layer outside your email entirely. These work alongside verification rather than replacing it, and together they narrow the path a fraudulent payment has to travel. Ubiquiti Networks disclosed roughly $46.7 million wired by an overseas subsidiary in 2015 on impostor executive instructions, with only about $8.1 million recovered; a first-time-wire hold and independent approval are exactly the controls that failure calls for.

Invoice Fraud and Gift-Card Requests

Two patterns show up often enough in accounts payable to deserve their own standing rules.

Invoice fraud manipulates a document you already expect. A fraudster sends a real-looking invoice from a known vendor with a changed remit-to address, a new bank account, or a slightly inflated amount, or invents a plausible vendor entirely. Match every invoice to a purchase order and receiving record, and treat any change to payment details on an otherwise familiar invoice as a bank-detail change: confirm it out of band before paying. Watch for new vendors, duplicate invoice numbers, and round-number amounts that do not tie to a PO.

Gift-card requests are simpler, because a legitimate one almost never exists. An “executive” asking staff to buy gift cards and send the codes is a scam in nearly every case, and the payment is irreversible and untraceable once the codes are shared. Do not leave this to judgment in the moment. Adopt a flat policy that your company never buys or sends gift cards on request, from anyone, through any channel, and make sure every person who could receive such a message knows the rule.

The Email, Identity, and Escalation Layer Behind Payments

Payment controls are the core defense, but a few supporting controls from a broader BEC prevention program make them harder to bypass. Keep these in proportion: they protect the accounts and the process, while the payment decision itself still rests on your verification controls.

Require phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication on finance mailboxes, banking portals, and any account with wire authority. Authenticators built on the WebAuthn and FIDO standards, described in NIST’s digital identity guidance, bind the login to the legitimate site, so a stolen password or a relayed code does not hand over the account. Understand the limit, though: MFA protects who can log in, not whether a given payment is legitimate. A properly authenticated user can still be talked into a fraudulent wire.

Keep email authentication in the same perspective. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC reduce direct spoofing of your own domain and are worth enforcing, but NIST is clear that they do not authenticate a message’s intent. They do nothing against a compromised legitimate mailbox, a look-alike domain, or a request that arrives by phone or text. Email authentication is a spoofing control, not a payment control.

Give staff a real escalation path. Name the person and the backup who verify high-risk requests, and make sure everyone in finance knows how to reach them quickly. Most importantly, executives have to back the process out loud. Leadership should tell finance in plain terms to delay any payment that fails verification, including one that appears to come from the top, and should never ask for an exception themselves. A control that an executive can override on the phone is not a control.

Training and Simulation That Build the Callback Reflex

Employees need practice applying the procedure while someone pushes back. Awareness training teaches people what fraud looks like; role-based drills build the willingness to pause a payment, refuse an urgent instruction, and place a callback under pressure.

Run role-based drills built around finance and accounts-payable workflows rather than generic phishing quizzes. Rehearse the situations that matter: an urgent executive wire, a supplier bank-detail change, a follow-up call in a familiar voice. Measure what the exercise is meant to build, which is verification and reporting behavior. A click rate on its own does not tell you whether staff ran the procedure, while a team that reports and calls back is doing the job even when a message slips through.

Because the modern version of this attack often pairs a convincing email with a cloned-voice call, drills should cross channels the way real attacks do.

Brightside gives finance and AP teams a way to rehearse these scenarios under realistic pressure. It runs email phishing simulations, live voice-phishing (vishing) simulations, and hybrid scenarios that combine the two, exercising the authority, urgency, pretexting, and social proof that CEO fraud depends on. Teams can practice the exact moment that matters: receiving an urgent payment or bank-change request and running the callback-and-refuse procedure while the pressure is on.

For organizations that want to test recognition of synthetic audio, authorized customers can create a custom executive voice replica from a short one-to-two-minute recording and use it in self-service audio simulations. Video-deepfake exercises are available as a managed service that the Brightside team scopes and runs, rather than a self-service feature. The aim of any of these is behavioral: staff practice verifying, escalating, and reporting, rather than being taught that they can reliably spot a fake by ear or eye. Brightside is the rehearsal layer of the program; it does not replace your payment authorization, email filtering, MFA, or incident response.

A Phased Implementation Checklist

You do not need to build everything at once. Sequence it so the controls with the most impact go live first.

This week

• Adopt and circulate the flat no-gift-card policy.
• Establish the callback rule and build a list of known, pre-stored contact numbers for your top vendors and executives.
• Give finance explicit permission to delay any request that fails verification.

Within 30 days

• Define payment thresholds and turn on dual authorization with independent verification above them.
• Require second-person approval for vendor master-file changes.
• Put holds on first-time beneficiaries and newly changed accounts.

Within 90 days

• Enable bank-side controls such as positive pay and out-of-band payment confirmation.
• Enforce phishing-resistant MFA on finance mailboxes and banking portals.
• Run the first finance-focused simulation and write the first-hour incident playbook below into a document your team can follow.

The First Hour After a Fraudulent Payment

If a fraudulent payment goes out, speed decides whether the money comes back. Work these steps in parallel rather than one after another.

Call your bank immediately and ask it to recall or freeze the payment and to contact the recipient institution. The FBI advises victims to contact their financial institution right away for exactly this reason. Across roughly 3,900 cases worked through its Financial Fraud Kill Chain in 2025, the FBI reported that about $679 million of $1.164 billion in attempted theft was frozen. That is an aggregate outcome and not a promise for any single case, but it shows why the first hour matters so much.

File a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov and notify local law enforcement. Prompt reporting is what allows financial institutions and investigators to coordinate a freeze.

Preserve the evidence. Keep the original emails with full headers, call records, the payment instructions, and system logs. Do not delete anything, and capture the timeline while it is fresh.

Contain any account that may be compromised. Reset credentials, revoke active sessions, and check the mailbox for forwarding rules or filters an attacker may have added to hide replies. Then alert the people likely to be targeted next, including other AP staff and the real vendor or executive who was impersonated, so a second attempt does not succeed while you are handling the first.

CEO Fraud Prevention FAQs for Finance Teams

Who in the company is actually targeted by CEO fraud? The people who can move money or change payment records, which usually means accounts payable, finance, payroll, and treasury staff. Attackers impersonate an executive or a supplier to pressure those roles. The executive’s name is the disguise; the finance employee is the target.

How should AP verify an urgent wire request that appears to come from the CEO? Call the requester back on a number you already have on file, never one supplied in the request, and confirm the exact amount, beneficiary, and account. Have a second person involved for material payments, record the verification, and hold the payment if you cannot confirm through a known channel. Pressure to move fast or keep quiet is a reason to slow down and check.

What is the safest way to handle a vendor’s request to change bank account details? Treat it as unverified until an independent callback to a known vendor contact confirms it, even if the request comes from the supplier’s real email address, which may be compromised. Require second-person approval for the master-file edit, hold payments to the new account through a cycle, and notify the vendor at their known contact that the change was made.

Does dual authorization stop CEO fraud? Only when the two approvers verify independently. Two people approving the same fraudulent email is one point of failure with a second signature on it. Real dual control means one person confirms the request and the other confirms the account against source records or a separate callback.

We already sent the money. What should finance do in the first hour? Call your bank at once and ask it to recall or freeze the payment and contact the receiving bank; file with the FBI’s IC3 and notify local law enforcement; preserve the original emails, headers, and logs; reset and contain any compromised account; and warn other staff and the impersonated party. The faster the bank and law enforcement move, the better the odds of a freeze.