How does B2B payment fraud happen? 5 risks to know

B2B payment fraud almost always starts the same way: someone impersonates a person or business your company already trusts, then uses that trust to redirect a payment or pull new banking details out of your accounts payable (AP) team. The method varies: a spoofed email, a fake invoice, a forged check, even a cloned voice on a phone call. The goal doesn’t: get your company to send money to an account it doesn’t control.

It’s also more common than most finance leaders would like. In 2025, 76% of U.S. organizations experienced attempted or actual payment fraud, according to the 2026 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey. Business email compromise (BEC) alone affected 74% of organizations, a sharp increase from the two years prior.

Here’s how B2B payment fraud most often happens, and what makes each method work.

The 5 most common ways B2B payment fraud happens

Before the deep dive, here’s the short version. Each of these risks targets a different point in the payment process, from the first point of contact to the moment funds actually move.

1. Business Email Compromise (BEC) and Executive Impersonation

BEC happens when a fraudster impersonates someone your AP or treasury team already trusts (an executive, a known vendor contact, sometimes even a law firm or bank) to get a payment approved or redirected.

It’s currently the single biggest driver of B2B payment fraud. AFP’s 2026 survey found BEC affected 74% of organizations in 2025, up significantly from the two years before. Separately, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center’s 2025 Internet Crime Report put BEC losses across the U.S. at $3.05 billion in 2025, from just under 25,000 complaints. That makes BEC the second-most costly cybercrime category behind investment fraud, and works out to an average reported loss of more than $120,000 per incident.

BEC used to mean a well-written, convincing email. That’s no longer the whole picture. AFP’s 2026 survey added new questions on AI-enabled fraud for the first time, reflecting growing concern about fraudsters using cloned voices and deepfake video to impersonate executives on calls and video meetings. In one real-world case AFP documented, a fraudster used a deepfake video call impersonating a company’s CFO to request an urgent payment over WhatsApp. The attempt only failed because the company had a “stop, think, and ask” policy that required a second form of verification before anyone acted.

That detail matters more than the technology. BEC rarely succeeds because the impersonation is flawless. It succeeds when there’s no independent step to confirm the request before the money moves.

2. Vendor and Invoice Fraud

Vendor and invoice fraud targets the accounts payable process directly, either by compromising a real supplier’s email account or by submitting a fraudulent invoice, in order to redirect a payment your company already intended to make.

It’s closely related to BEC, but the target is different. BEC impersonates a person to create urgency. Vendor and invoice fraud goes after the vendor master file: the record of approved suppliers and their banking details that AP relies on to pay invoices correctly. In one AFP-documented scenario, a fraudster gained access to a real vendor’s email account and sent legitimate-looking messages asking to update banking details on file. Because the request came from a real, recognized email address, nobody had reason to scrutinize it the way they might a message from an unfamiliar sender.

Fake invoices work on a similar principle. A document that looks routine enough (right vendor name, plausible amount, familiar format) can move through approval without anyone matching it against a purchase order or the vendor’s normal pricing.

3. Check Fraud

Check fraud includes washing (chemically altering the payee or amount), counterfeiting, forged signatures, and outright theft of checks in the mail. It’s a low-tech risk in an otherwise digital payments world, and it’s still the most frequently targeted payment method in B2B payments.

AFP’s 2026 survey found checks were cited by 58% of organizations as a fraud target, ahead of ACH debits (30%) and wire transfers (25%). Part of the reason is structural: every check carries the full bank account and routing number in plain text, and it has to physically travel through the mail before anyone deposits it. That’s a lot of exposure for a single payment.

Checks also offer limited visibility once they’re issued. You typically don’t know a check has been altered until it clears, which is why banks offer positive pay programs (matching each check against an issued list before paying it) as an added layer of protection.

The exposure hasn’t pushed checks out of B2B payments, though. AFP found 72% of organizations that use checks plan to keep using them, and 68% of those cited vendor preference as the reason. That’s a real operational constraint, not just an old habit finance teams haven’t gotten around to breaking.

4. ACH and Wire Transfer Fraud

ACH (Automated Clearing House) and wire fraud happens when a fraudster gains direct access to banking credentials, typically through phishing or account takeover, or successfully redirects a legitimate ACH or wire payment, often as the final step in a BEC or vendor impersonation scheme that started somewhere else.

Speed is what makes these two payment rails attractive to fraudsters. Both are built to move money quickly, and neither carries the same dispute or chargeback protections available on card transactions. Once a wire clears, or an ACH file settles, the window to recall the funds can be measured in hours. AFP’s data on payment-method targeting (ACH debits at 30%, wire transfers at 25%) reflects how often these rails are the last step in a scheme rather than the first one.

Account takeover adds another layer of risk. If a fraudster gets directly into a company’s banking portal, they don’t need to trick anyone into approving a payment. They can simply initiate one.

5. Internal or Employee-Facilitated Fraud

Internal fraud happens when someone with legitimate access to AP systems (an AP clerk, a controller, a procurement manager) uses that access to redirect payments, create fictitious vendors, or approve changes that benefit them or an outside accomplice.

It’s the risk category that gets the least attention, mostly because fraud conversations tend to focus on outside attackers. But every risk above still needs an internal moment where a person accepts a request as legitimate: approving a bank-detail change, releasing a payment, onboarding a new vendor. If one person controls that entire process end to end, there’s no second set of eyes to catch a mistake (or a scheme) before the payment goes out.

What makes these risks possible in the first place

Most B2B payment fraud doesn’t exploit a technical vulnerability. It exploits a gap in verification: a bank-detail change nobody called to confirm, an invoice nobody matched against a purchase order, a payment approved because the request looked familiar rather than because someone checked it.

A few patterns show up across all 5 risks above:

• Manual, paper- or email-based processes create more places for a fraudulent request to blend in.
• Limited visibility into payment status means fraud is often caught after money has already moved, not before it.
• Trust gets treated as verification, even though a familiar vendor name or an executive’s name in the “from” field doesn’t actually confirm anything.

Frequently asked questions about B2B payment fraud

How common is B2B payment fraud?

Very common. AFP’s 2026 survey found 76% of U.S. organizations experienced attempted or actual payment fraud in 2025. That’s down slightly from 80% in 2023, which came close to the survey’s historical high of 82% in 2018. The rate moves from year to year, but it hasn’t dropped below “most organizations” in well over a decade.

Is B2B payment fraud mostly a large-company problem?

No, though the data has an important nuance. AFP found that 66% of organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue reported financial losses from fraud in 2025, compared with 48% of organizations under $1 billion. Larger organizations report fraud losses more often, but smaller organizations typically have fewer dedicated resources to detect and recover from an incident once it happens, which can make a single successful attempt more damaging relative to the size of the business.

What’s the difference between business email compromise and vendor fraud?

BEC is about impersonation: a fraudster poses as a trusted person, often an executive or vendor contact, to create urgency and get a payment approved. Vendor and invoice fraud is about the target: it goes after the vendor master file or invoice approval process directly, often through a compromised vendor email account rather than a spoofed one. In practice, the two frequently overlap. A BEC attempt is often what compromises the account that vendor fraud later exploits.

Can virtual cards help reduce B2B payment fraud risk?

Yes, in a specific way. A virtual card generates a unique, single-use account number for a transaction instead of relying on a static bank account and routing number that’s exposed on every check or ACH payment. That can limit what a fraudster can do with a stolen or intercepted number, and transaction-level controls like vendor restrictions and spend limits can reduce the impact if a fraudulent request does get through. Virtual cards can help reduce risk, but they don’t eliminate it. Most finance teams treat them as one control among several.

What this means for your team

You don’t need five separate fixes for five separate risks. Most of the controls that address one (verifying bank-detail changes, adding visibility into payment status, separating who approves a payment from who issues it) address several of these risks at once. Knowing where the risk actually sits makes it easier to decide what to fix first.

For more insights and updates on corporate payments, check out:

• Your guide to virtual card rebates
• 2027 business payment trends
• How to prevent B2B payment errors before year-end

Learn more about how WEX payment solutions can be tailored to your business, so you can accelerate and streamline operations while creating lasting growth and success for your organization.

The information in this blog post is for educational purposes only. It is not legal or tax advice. For legal or tax advice, you should consult your own legal counsel, tax, and investment advisers.

Copyright ©2026 WEX Inc. All rights reserved. The information in this document is subject to change without notice.