Recent developments in AI have made payments scams cheaper to pull off and troublingly effective. And it’s not just consumers in the crosshairs—every year this kind of fraud costs businesses billions. So what can you do to protect your organisation?
That’s the question we explore in this WIRED Consulting virtual briefing featuring Jenny Radcliffe, a.k.a. “The People Hacker”, an expert on the human side of cybersecurity, and Robert Thorpe, Managing Director of Finance and Operations at Allegro, who has a special interest in the operational impact of fraud.
Hosted by WIRED Consulting’s Charlie Burton, the conversation covers the state-of-the-art techniques scammers can use to gain your trust; the multi-faceted impact of payment fraud on businesses; and what a robust defence strategy looks like when the technology is moving so fast.
Payments scams are a growing problem for businesses. On the one hand that’s because AI can help make them more persuasive. Large language models can generate convincing phishing emails; deepfake imagery and audio can be used to convince an individual to transfer money to someone they shouldn’t. But it’s also because AI is making those scams scalable. Fraudsters can automate attacks on multiple businesses simultaneously. “These campaigns can hit thousands of targets at once, looking for someone to bite,” says Radcliffe. Combine that with real-time payment systems, which make funds harder to recover, and you have a perfect storm for financial crime.
For businesses, it’s not just the immediate financial hit that’s so damaging. The indirect costs and long-term effects, such as legal fees, forensic costs, regulatory fines, and consequences for workplace morale and employee wellbeing, can all be significant. “The scam itself is only the beginning,” says Thorpe. “You've got lawyers involved, interviewing people within the firm—the processes within that company are under scrutiny, the finance team is under scrutiny. It's not an experience that you want to live through at all.”
Yet it’s an experience that’s increasingly commonplace. Today, the default posture among the C-suite ought to be: we will be targeted, so what can we do?
Watch the full panel discussion above or on YouTube to find out…
Meet our experts
Jenny Radcliffe is a professional social engineer, hired to bypass security systems through a mixture of psychology, con-artistry, cunning, and guile. She has spent a lifetime talking her way into secure locations, protecting clients from scammers, and leading simulated criminal attacks on organisations of all sizes in order to help keep money, data, and information secure from malicious attacks.
Robert Thorpe is Managing Director at Allegro Funds, Australasia’s leading private equity funds manager specializing in corporate carve out, turnaround, and special situations investments. He has over 27 years of experience in the finance industry, focused on infrastructure and private equity funds. He was previously a director of the Macquarie Group.
Charlie Burton is WIRED Consulting’s Head of Editorial Content, and specializes in how technology is transforming business. Charlie began his career at WIRED in 2008 as part of the founding editorial team of WIRED UK. He became the magazine’s Associate Editor before spending a decade as Senior Editor and technology columnist at GQ. He returned to WIRED in 2022 to oversee editorial content for WIRED’s Consulting division.
About our sponsor
Eftsure is the global market leader in payment fraud prevention. Specifically designed for businesses, eftsure’s end-to-end solution safeguards nearly $24 billion in B2B payments each month. Their mission is to build a safer business community. With a large and continuously growing database of verified vendor details (the only one of its kind), they use multi-factor verification to give businesses greater knowledge and control over onboarding vendors, receiving invoices and making payments. In short, they ensure our customers never pay the wrong people.
