Each month, the team at Eftsure monitors the headlines for the latest accounts payable (AP) and security news. We bring you all the essential stories in our cyber brief so your team can stay secure.
FinCEN flags nearly $13 billion in scam-center investment fraud
FinCEN says financial institutions filed reports covering nearly $13 billion in suspected digital-asset investment scams, commonly known as "pig butchering," tied to overseas scam centers, based on activity reported between September 2023 and December 2025.
The alert outlines red flags for scam-center activity, including "guarantee marketplaces" where operators buy phishing and money-laundering services, and urges institutions to share information under the PATRIOT Act's Section 314(b) safe harbor. For finance teams, it's a reminder that the social-engineering playbook fueling investment scams, built on fake personas and manufactured urgency, is increasingly aimed at accounts payable too.
South Bend schools stop $1 million vendor-impersonation fraud
South Bend Community Schools identified and stopped a $1.03 million fraud attempt after scammers impersonated a vendor and requested a change to payment details, according to WSBT.
The district caught the fraudulent request before funds moved and is now reviewing its payment-verification safeguards. The near-miss is a useful counterpoint to costlier incidents this year: it shows that a single verification step, applied consistently, can be the difference between a stopped attempt and a seven-figure loss.
City of Rushford recovers most of $250,000 lost to wire fraud
The City of Rushford, Minnesota wired more than $250,000 intended for a state loan payoff to a fraudulent account after its email system was compromised, according to KTTC.
Officials say most of the funds have since been recovered, and the city is now consolidating its email systems and retraining staff to spot phishing attempts. The case is a reminder that even one-off, high-value payments, like a loan payoff, need the same verification discipline as recurring vendor payments.
EY: autonomous AI adoption is outpacing governance
A new EY survey finds that businesses are rolling out autonomous, agentic AI faster than they can build the oversight to govern it, opening a widening AI governance gap.
The survey found many organizations lack clear ownership, monitoring or escalation paths for decisions AI agents make independently, including in finance workflows. In other words, the tools moving fastest into accounts payable and payment approval are often the ones with the least defined guardrails. For finance leaders, the findings reinforce the need for clear human-in-the-loop checkpoints before agentic tools touch payment decisions.
Review: human error drives 85% of cyber insurance losses
Resilience's Midyear Cyber Risk Report, covered by CFO Dive, found human error was behind 85.3% of the cyber insurance losses in its claims portfolio during the first half of 2026, up from 17.7% two years earlier.
The insurer says AI is sharpening social engineering across the board, from phishing emails to voice deepfakes, making attacks more convincing than routine training can keep pace with. The findings reinforce that technical controls alone won't close the gap: verification steps that don't rely on a single human judgment call are becoming the more reliable defense for high-value payment approvals.
Gartner: CFOs must bring more discipline to AI investments
A new Gartner survey of 160 senior finance leaders finds that AI adoption in finance has moved past initial experimentation into a more tactical phase, and CFOs now need a more disciplined approach to managing their AI portfolios.
The research found straightforward tasks like data extraction and accounts payable automation typically deliver returns within nine to 10 months, while forecasting and other complex uses take longer. Gartner flagged low AI literacy, not talent scarcity, as the biggest barrier finance teams now face, a reminder that a quick win on invoice processing should not crowd out slower, harder controls work.
