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Vendor Email Compromise

Preventing Vendor Email Compromise with Eftsure

Vendor email compromise (VEC) is a growing threat to businesses of all sizes. Fraudsters exploit vulnerabilities in email systems to impersonate vendors and trick companies into making payments to fraudulent accounts. This can lead to significant financial losses, reputational damage, and disrupted operations.

Eftsure safeguards your business from these sophisticated scams with our advanced, real-time vendor bank account verification solution.

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Understanding Vendor Email Compromise

Vendor email compromise involves cybercriminals gaining access to a vendor's email account or creating a similar email address to send fraudulent invoices or payment instructions. These emails often look legitimate and come from the vendor’s actual email address, making it difficult for employees to distinguish between a real vendor request and a fraudulent one. The consequences can be devastating, including:

  • Financial losses: payments made to fraudulent accounts are often unrecoverable.
  • Operational disruptions: rectifying a VEC incident can divert resources and severely impact business operations.
  • Reputational damage: falling victim to VEC can harm your business's reputation with customers and partners.

 

How Eftsure Prevents Vendor Email Compromise

Eftsure offers a fraud prevention solution to prevent vendor email compromise by verifying the vendor’s bank details independently before any payment is made.

  1. Real-time verification: Eftsure continuously monitors and verifies the bank account details of your vendors against our extensive database. Any discrepancies are flagged immediately, ensuring that payments are only made to verified accounts. These signals are provided from the time a new vendor is onboarded to the release of funds.
  2. Secure vendor onboarding portal: Eftsure secures the vendor onboarding process by verifying all vendor details at the time of setup. This happens through a secure portal where many different anti-fraud checks are conducted, ensuring that only legitimate vendors are added to your payment system.
  3. Shared continuous monitoring: Eftsure continuously updates and monitors vendor information, providing ongoing protection against evolving threats. Eftsure’s network analyzes payments to vendors and ensures your vendor master data always contains the most recent and accurate banking information.

 

Benefits of Using Eftsure

Implementing Eftsure's verification solution offers numerous benefits:

Enhanced Security

Protect your business from the financial and reputational damage caused by vendor email compromise.

Increased Efficiency

Streamline your payment processes with real-time verification and automated checks. No verbal verification or callback controls are required.

Peace of Mind

Rest assured that your vendor payments are secure, allowing you to focus on growing your business.

FAQs

Vendor email compromise (VEC) is a type of cyber attack where fraudsters gain access to a vendor's email account to manipulate invoices or intercept financial transactions. This can lead to unauthorized changes in payment instructions, resulting in financial losses for the targeted business.

Eftsure prevents VEC by providing real-time verification of vendor bank details. Our system ensures that any changes to their bank details are thoroughly verified before being accepted, thus preventing unauthorized modifications. When releasing funds, users can access this verified information via real-time alerts in the entire procure-to-pay (P2P) process.

Vendor email compromise is very hard to detect, but there are signs to look out for. Signs of a VEC attempt may include unexpected changes in vendor payment instructions, changes to bank account details, emails requesting urgent payment actions, or discrepancies in email communication patterns. Eftsure's system helps detect these anomalies and flags suspicious activities.

Eftsure secures transactions by verifying all vendor bank details against a continuously updated database. This verification process ensures that any changes to vendor information are legitimate and authorized, preventing fraudulent activities. If vendors don’t exist in the database, Eftsure will initiate a verification that can be completed online or by phone.

In addition to using Eftsure's verification solution, businesses can protect themselves by:

  • Implementing strong email security measures, including multi-factor authentication.
  • Training employees to recognize and report suspicious emails.
  • Establishing clear protocols for verifying changes in vendor payment instructions.
  • Regularly updating and monitoring email security and vendor management systems.

 

Yes, in addition to preventing VEC, Eftsure also offers solutions to protect against ACH payment fraud, AI deepfake fraud, push payment fraud, and other types of cyber threats. Our comprehensive verification system helps secure your business's financial transactions and communications.

To get started with Eftsure, simply request a demo. Our team of qualified accountants will provide you with more information about vendor email compromise threats and show you Eftsure product features.

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