The consequences of email fraud prevention strategies can be serious for businesses and individuals, including monetary loss, identity theft and disruptions to daily business operations. Often, bad actors steal credentials in the form of fake login pages that download malware or promise victims that they’ve won a prize or other incentive, then use those credentials to commit further fraud or theft. Other common email fraud techniques include advance fee frauds and wire fraud, which is typically used to defraud individuals and companies that operate a large online presence, such as banks, airlines or e-commerce platforms.

Email Fraud Prevention Strategies

In order to combat the many types of fraudulent emails, companies should implement multiple strategies for email fraud prevention. Educating employees on what to look for and encouraging them to forward suspicious emails rather than respond will help to reduce successful compromises. In addition, training new hires on company security policies and procedures can help to foster a culture of cybersecurity awareness that will mitigate the impact of phishing attacks.

In addition to educating employees, companies should deploy email authentication protocols like DKIM and DMARC to verify the authenticity of email senders and block forged messages. Emails that are addressed to a random recipient, such as “Dear XXXX,” or contain language not typically used by friends and work colleagues are more likely to be a malicious attempt to trick recipients into interacting with the attacker, and should be acted upon immediately or reported to a colleague for confirmation. Finally, a comprehensive fraud detection solution that uses email address identity verification checks, live appends and domain reputation can provide a precise risk score for each transaction or registration, which will prevent the most sophisticated attempts to bypass traditional email filtering.