It’s a good time to be a fraudster.
The buzz words of 2025: uncertainty, tariffs, and AI. Together, they’re making a “perfect storm for fraud” to run rampant, Andi McNeal, chief training officer at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, recently told CFO Brew.
And this new fraud-friendly environment comes after the Covid-19 pandemic created many new fraudsters. According to McNeal, the democratization of fraud due to increased access to technology, and the financial strain from the pandemic meant that many people who never thought of committing fraud before started dipping their toes in criminal waters. Now, those newly minted fraudsters are ready to put your money where their mouth is and start scamming.
“A lot of folks realize the barrier to entry to committing fraud is so much lower now, that it makes it much more likely that you’re going to have a larger group trying it,” McNeal said.
With that in mind, experts told us that CFOs should be aware of the increasing fraud riskand start preparing employees to catch it.
Uncertainty breeds…Trump’s flip-flopping tariffs; a will-they, won’t-they war in the Middle East; and the explosion of AI have made uncertainty part of the fabric of today’s business landscape.
And that gives fraudsters an opening.
“The greater the level of uncertainty, the more opportunities there are for fraudsters,” Janet McHard, founding partner of fraud consultancy the McHard Firm, told us. “A lot of fraudsters specifically take advantage of chaos.”
Uncertainty pushes on two of the points in the fraud triangle: motivation and opportunity. (The third is rationalization.) Uncertainty puts more stress on individuals to solve problems quickly. Uncertainty also means businesses have less coverage and control, which creates more opportunities for criminals, according to McNeal.
“Uncertainty and fraud are best friends,” she said.
Volatility. Warren Buffett said, “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked.” That’s true of fraud as well. Economic pressure may create more incentive to commit it, but just as often, businesses start watching their money more closely. There isn’t necessarily more fraud— instead, more of it is being uncovered, according to McHard.
“When the economy is tougher, business owners across all lines and levels of business are paying more attention to where I’m spending my money,” McHard said. “They find fraud because they’re paying more attention because they’re worried about where the economy is going to go in the next six months.”
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Case in point: McHard noted that “when the economy tanks,” her fraud consultancy business gets busier.
Technology and AI. Fraud has already been supersized by technology, and now we’re entering an all-out explosion.
As the movement of money became electronic, speed became a huge risk factor for fraud. According to McHard, “the money disappears way faster, it jumps international jurisdictions…and makes recovery way harder.” But with AI, we’re about to enter the era of increased fraud quality and quantity, as well.
“Technology now not only can make it so that the messages are more legitimate-seeming, but they can also blast them and hit so many targets,” McNeal said. “And all they need is one to be successful in order to pay off for doing that.”
According to Mary Breslin, founder and managing partner of audit training company Verracy, a simple phishing scam would take a scammer weeks or months to write and deploy, but with AI it can take minutes, and then can be rewritten “5,000 times over the course of the next day.” That makes it harder for businesses to warn each other if they see the same type of scam popping up.
And fake emails have also become more sophisticated with AI, better mimicking executives and less prone to the typical language mistakes that used to help employees spot phishing schemes. And that’s not to mention AI’s capability to create deepfake video and audio to fool employees.
“Nobody runs faster to technology than bad guys,” Breslin said.
The window between when fraudsters get their hands on a new tool and when general public awareness, business education, and laws catch up is the most vulnerable and, according to Breslin, “we are in that moment right now.”
Get ready. “There’s a lot of preventive measures I think organizations should be doing that they’re not,” Breslin said.
She encourages companies to create processes for different risk groups to talk to each other. According to her, many companies have an audit function, a risk committee, and a compliance department that never interact.
She also advises companies to invest in fraud awareness training to turn everyone at the company into a fraud fighter. McNeal agreed, noting that “prevention is better than detection.”
“I do think the speed at which fraud is happening is absolutely increasing,” McNeal said, “and I unfortunately do not know that the fight against fraud is increasing.”