Accounts payable fraud – from fake vendor invoices to altered payment details – is a growing threat that costs businesses billions.
Accounts payable fraud is a common type of deception that targets a company's accounts payable department, and can be committed internally by employees, externally by vendors, or through collusion between both parties. Bynn’s cutting-edge AI acts as your bionic eyes in the finance department, stopping fraudulent invoices and payment documents in their tracks. Our solution detects account payable fraud in any document, from any country, in seconds.
Organizations lose roughly 5% of their annual revenue to fraud, with median losses per case reaching around $120,000, and fraud typically goes unnoticed for an average of 14 months, resulting in significant financial losses. Companies using Bynn catch up to 90%
more invoice fraud, cut manual review work by 90%, and verify each document in under 20 seconds. It’s the ultimate safeguard to protect your payables and ensure no fake invoice ever slips through.
Bynn leverages AP automation to streamline your accounts payable processes, but automation can also introduce new risks, making it essential to safeguard your financial assets and financial transactions. Accounts payable fraud works through various payments fraud tactics, such as fake invoices, check tampering, phishing, and collusion with vendors, all designed to exploit weaknesses in payment processes.
Your AI “Bionic Eyes” for Catching Fake Invoices
Never pay a fraudulent bill again. Bynn empowers your accounts payable team with AI-driven vigilance, examining every invoice and payment document for hidden tampering or forgery. Detecting AP fraud requires vigilance against a range of schemes, including billing schemes, check fraud, and fictitious vendors. Even the most sophisticated accounts payable fraud typologies are no match for Bynn’s multi-layered detection:
Invisible PDF Edits
Reused & Template-Farmed Documents
AI-Generated Forgeries
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Common forms of accounts payable fraud include falsified invoices, duplicate payments, or fraudulent vendor accounts. The most common abuses within the accounts payable process include billing schemes, check fraud, and expense reimbursement fraud.
Billing fraud involves fraudulent or manipulated invoices, including fake vendors (also known as fictitious vendors—fake entities created to facilitate fraud), inflated charges, or duplicate payments. Check tampering, a major category of AP fraud, involves altering checks issued by the company, such as changing the payee's name or the amount on the check. Duplicate payments can arise from processing the same invoice multiple times, either intentionally through billing schemes or due to oversight.
Audit trails and internal audits are essential for detecting AP fraud, uncovering anomalies, and supporting investigations. These controls help ensure transparency, accountability, and the integrity of financial processes.
Types of Insurance Fraud
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Invoice Fraud
Fraudsters create fake invoices or manipulate legitimate ones to siphon funds from the company. This can include altering payment details, inflating amounts, or submitting invoices for goods and services never delivered.
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Ghost Vendors
These are fictitious suppliers set up in the accounts payable system, often by insiders, to generate fake invoices and divert payments to fraudulent accounts.
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Check Tampering
This involves altering company-issued checks—such as changing the payee or amount—to redirect funds to unauthorized recipients.
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Overbilling
Vendors may submit invoices for more than what was delivered, or for higher-priced goods and services, hoping the overcharge goes unnoticed.
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Vendor Collusion
Sometimes, an internal employee conspires with an external vendor to approve payments for undelivered or overpriced goods, splitting the proceeds.
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Expense Reimbursement Fraud
Employees may submit false or inflated expense reports, claiming reimbursement for personal or non-existent expenses.
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Duplicate Payments
Whether due to administrative oversight or intentional manipulation, processing the same invoice more than once can result in significant losses—especially if fraudsters exploit this loophole.
You can configure which categories matter most for your use case and define custom actions (warning, removal, review, etc.) based on the severity. Our multi-category approach means one integration with Bynn’s API gives you a full spectrum of protection – from filtering profanity in chat, to blocking hate speech, to stopping financially motivated fraud in SMS.
Don’t Automate Your Payables Without Fraud Checks
Modern finance teams love automation – from invoice scanning to automatic payments. AP automation can streamline accounts payable processes, but it also introduces new fraud risks if not paired with robust controls. If you’re automating accounts payable workflows without checking for fake documents, you’re automating fraud payouts.
Bynn acts as a critical fraud detection filter in your AP process. To prevent fraud and reduce fraud risks, it’s essential to implement strong internal controls, such as segregation of duties, and maintain comprehensive audit trails. These measures are crucial for preventing fraudulent payments and ensuring transparency. Whether you use an ERP, accounting software, or even Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline invoicing, integrating Bynn ensures that fraudulent documents are caught before any payment is approved. A well-structured company's accounts payable system, supported by audit trails and clear rules and best practices for payment processes, safeguards against fraud and ensures only legitimate payments are processed. Unlike bolt-on fixes that treat document verification as an afterthought, Bynn’s solution makes document fraud prevention a priority at the core of your workflow. The result? You can confidently automate invoice processing knowing every document is vetted for authenticity.
Vendor Verification and Management
Effective vendor verification and management are essential strategies to prevent accounts payable fraud and ensure only legitimate vendors receive payments. When onboarding new vendors, companies should conduct comprehensive background checks, verifying business licenses, tax identification numbers, and other credentials to confirm the vendor’s legitimacy. This process helps eliminate the risk of ghost vendors and reduces the likelihood of fraudulent payments.
Maintaining accurate and up-to-date vendor information, especially bank account details, is crucial for preventing unauthorized changes that could lead to fraudulent disbursements. Regularly reviewing vendor activity and performance can help identify unusual patterns, such as sudden changes in payment details or unexpected spikes in invoice volume, which may signal potential fraud.
Leveraging vendor verification software and automated tools can streamline these processes, making it easier to validate vendor identities and monitor for suspicious activity. By prioritizing vendor verification and ongoing management, companies can significantly reduce the risk of AP fraud and ensure that every payment is made to a legitimate, trusted partner.
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Any Document, Any Language – All While Keeping Data Private
Invoices come in countless formats and languages – especially as your business deals with global suppliers. Bynn is document-agnostic and language-agnostic. Our AI doesn’t need to “read” the content or rely on specific templates to detect fraud. Instead, it analyzes how a document is built (its digital DNA) rather than what it says. This means Bynn can verify PDFs, images, scans, and more from any country or language with equal accuracy. An invoice in English, Chinese, Spanish or any other language is handled just the same. And because we focus on structural and forensic signals instead of sensitive customer data, your information remains private and secure. Bynn’s process safeguards your data privacy at all times – no invoice content is stored or exposed, only the authenticity is checked.
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Employee Training and Awareness
A well-informed team is one of the strongest defenses against accounts payable fraud. Employee training and awareness programs are vital for equipping staff with the knowledge to recognize and prevent AP fraud schemes. Regular training sessions should cover the various types of AP fraud, such as invoice fraud, expense reimbursement fraud, and internal fraud, as well as the warning signs of suspicious activity.
Employees should be educated on the importance of segregation of duties—ensuring that no single individual has control over all aspects of a financial transaction. This reduces the risk of unauthorized payments and fraudulent behavior. Training should also include clear guidelines on expense reimbursement policies, invoice processing procedures, and the steps to take when fraud is suspected.
Establishing a culture of fraud awareness encourages employees to report red flags and fosters a sense of accountability throughout the organization. By investing in ongoing education and promoting transparency, companies can strengthen their AP fraud prevention efforts and minimize the risk of internal and external fraud.
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Clear, Explainable Results – Not Just Risk Scores
Many anti-fraud tools give you an opaque risk score (like “68% risk” vs “82% risk”) and leave you guessing what to do. Bynn cuts through that noise with clear, actionable verdicts for each document. Every analyzed invoice comes back with a straightforward recommendation – for example: Trusted, Warning, or High Risk – along with an explanation of why. You’ll see the evidence for the given recommendation: perhaps the system found the total amount was mathematically inconsistent with the line items, or the document’s metadata shows it was created with an untrusted tool, or the bank account number was altered. This level of explanation gives your accounts payable team confidence to identify unauthorized transactions and make the right decision every time. Creating audit trails for every decision supports transparency, enables the calculation and detection of accounts payable fraud, and helps track suspicious activity.
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Accounts Payable Fraud Risk Assessment
Regular accounts payable fraud risk assessments are crucial for identifying vulnerabilities within your AP processes and proactively preventing fraudulent activities. A comprehensive risk assessment involves reviewing every stage of the AP workflow—from invoice receipt and approval to payment authorization and account reconciliation—to pinpoint potential weaknesses.
Utilizing risk assessment software and structured evaluation techniques can help streamline this process, making it easier to identify gaps in internal controls, vendor management, and employee training. The assessment should also examine the effectiveness of existing fraud prevention measures and highlight areas where additional safeguards may be needed.
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By conducting periodic risk assessments, companies can stay ahead of evolving fraud schemes, strengthen their internal controls, and ensure their accounts payable operations remain secure and compliant. This proactive approach not only helps prevent AP fraud but also supports the overall integrity of your financial records and business operations.
Customize Decisions to Fit Your Risk Policy
Every company’s risk appetite is different. Bynn’s accounts payable fraud detection is fully customizable to your policies and preferences. Don’t want to accept invoice screenshots or photos? No problem – you can configure Bynn to automatically flag or reject any document that isn’t an original PDF. Prefer to require certain supplier documents to have digital signatures or specific watermarks? You can set those rules. Bynn’s decision engine lets you adjust thresholds and rules with fine granularity, leveraging any document attribute – from the document type, source, issuer, all the way down to specific modifications detected.
Customizing these controls is crucial for addressing various accounts payable fraud schemes, such as fake vendors, inflated invoices, and non-delivery fraud, as well as for detecting and preventing ap fraud accounts. Regular audits and internal audits are essential for maintaining your company's financial health and compliance, as they help uncover anomalies and inconsistencies in financial records that may indicate accounts payable ap fraud.
With near-perfect accuracy, our system adapts to your business goals: you decide what is considered “trusted” versus “high risk.” This means your accounts payable process aligns with your internal controls. For example, if your policy says “never pay an invoice that has been edited after it was signed”, Bynn will catch that scenario every time. If you only pay vendors on an approved list, Bynn can cross-verify issuer details and help block imposters. You remain in control, and our AI works within your parameters to stop fraud without creating false alarms or unnecessary friction.
It’s important to note that accounts payable ap fraud can have serious legal repercussions, including criminal charges and civil judgments against perpetrators.
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Boost Fraud Detection with Behavioral Intelligence
Documents tell a story – but so do the behaviors around them. Bynn goes beyond just analyzing the invoice itself; it also considers contextual and behavioral data to catch up to 30% more fraud than document checks alone. What does this mean? Imagine multiple suspicious invoices all submitted from the same device or IP address, or an unusual pattern where one vendor always triggers document warnings. Bynn can integrate these signals (device fingerprints, user behavior patterns, geolocation of uploads, timing and frequency of submissions, etc.) into its fraud assessments. By enriching document analysis with behavioral intelligence, our platform can flag coordinated fraud attempts that might look harmless in isolation. For instance, if a fraudster tries the same fake invoice template across different departments or a group of vendors suddenly changes their bank details, Bynn will notice the pattern.
Bynn also monitors for cyber and phishing fraud, including business email compromise and unauthorized system access. Urgent payment requests and changes to supplier accounts are red flags that may indicate account payable fraud, especially when combined with phishing attempts designed to trick staff into updating account information or bypassing standard approval procedures. These additional insights can then be fed into your broader risk stack – helping not just your AP team, but also informing security and compliance teams of potential fraud rings or high-risk activities. With Bynn, you get a 360° view of fraud risk: the document’s integrity plus the context in which it’s being used.
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How Bynn Detects Invoice Fraud in Seconds
Using Bynn is simple, whether through our user-friendly web interface or seamless API integration into your accounts payable software. In just a few seconds, each document undergoes multiple layers of AI-driven scrutiny:
Upload/Submit
First, you provide the invoice or document to Bynn – either by dragging-and-dropping it into our dashboard or through an automated API feed from your invoice processing system. Our platform supports all common formats (PDF, JPEG, PNG, etc.), so you can feed it scans or digital files from any source.
Quality Check
As soon as the document is received, Bynn performs an instant quality check. It ensures the file is readable, complete, and not corrupted. If a document is too low-resolution or tampered in a way that makes data unreadable, you’ll know immediately. This step saves time by filtering out illegible or empty files.
Document Classification
Next, our AI quickly determines the document’s type and structure. Is it an invoice, a purchase order, a receipt, a bank statement? Bynn verifies that the file is what it claims to be. For example, if someone tries to pass off a photoshopped bank statement as an invoice, our system will detect the inconsistency. This classification ensures that each document is routed through the appropriate fraud checks for its category and that no mismatched or bogus document slips by.
Authenticity Analysis
Now the heavy lifting begins. Bynn’s machine learning and forensic analysis engines scrutinize the document from every angle to determine if it’s authentic or fraudulent. In this stage, we:
- Examine the PDF or image metadata for clues of editing or fabrication (e.g., detecting if editing software was used, or if creation timestamps don’t align).
- Recover hidden version history in files – for PDFs, Bynn can uncover previous versions and edits that were made, highlighting exactly what changed and when.
- Cross-check the document against trusted databases (for instance, known legitimate invoice formats, or verification of business registration numbers if present).
- Validate any digital signatures or QR codes embedded in the document, confirming they are valid and that nothing was altered after signing.
- Perform cross-field consistency checks – for invoices, Bynn recalculates totals, taxes, and line items to ensure everything adds up correctly and flags any financial inconsistencies.
- Apply our fraud pattern recognition, looking for those subtle signs of forgery (like irregular fonts, erased backgrounds, AI-generated text artifacts, and more as described above).
- Integrate with positive pay services to help prevent check tampering and detect fraudulent checks before payment is processed.
- Maintain comprehensive audit trails throughout every step, supporting real-time monitoring, transparency, and compliance, and making it easier to identify irregularities in accounts payable processes.
- Incorporate best practices and insights from certified fraud examiners ACFE, whose research and guidelines help set the standard for effective fraud detection and investigation.
Decision & Report (instant)
As soon as the analysis is done, Bynn immediately delivers a verdict. You receive a detailed report through the dashboard or via API/webhook, showing the document’s fraud status (Trusted/Warning/High Risk as configured) along with all the evidence and reasons behind it. If the document meets your criteria, it can be auto-approved for payment without slowing down your process. If it’s flagged, it can be automatically routed for manual review or rejection according to your workflow. This all happens in moments – so your team gets results almost in real-time, typically in well under a minute from submission to decision.
As soon as the analysis is done, Bynn immediately delivers a verdict. You receive a detailed report through the dashboard or via API/webhook, showing the document’s fraud status (Trusted/Warning/High Risk as configured) along with all the evidence and reasons behind it. If the document meets your criteria, it can be auto-approved for payment without slowing down your process. If it’s flagged, it can be automatically routed for manual review or rejection according to your workflow. This all happens in moments – so your team gets results almost in real-time, typically in well under a minute from submission to decision.
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Accounts Payable Fraud Investigation
When accounts payable fraud is suspected, a prompt and thorough investigation is essential to uncover the source and extent of the issue. Establishing a dedicated fraud investigation team—often including certified fraud examiners—ensures that suspected cases are handled with expertise and objectivity.
The investigation process typically involves a detailed review of accounts payable records, such as invoices, payment histories, and vendor information, to identify discrepancies and patterns indicative of fraudulent transactions. Advanced data analytics tools can assist in sifting through large volumes of financial data, making it easier to spot anomalies and trace the flow of funds. Interviews with relevant employees and vendors may also be necessary to gather additional evidence and clarify the circumstances surrounding suspicious activity.
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By conducting comprehensive investigations, companies can not only recover lost assets but also identify weaknesses in their AP processes and implement corrective actions to prevent future fraud. Thorough documentation and reporting of findings further support compliance and continuous improvement in fraud prevention efforts.
Safeguard Your Payables Process – Starting Now
Accounts payable is the lifeblood of your business operations, and it’s too important to leave exposed to fraud. Accounts payable fraud can result in significant financial losses and threaten your company’s financial assets. Fraudulent activities not only impact your organization, but can also have far-reaching effects on employees, customers, investors, and suppliers—and in extreme cases, can even lead to bankruptcy. Bynn’s AI-powered solution has already checked 150 million+ documents worldwide, helping companies large and small stay secure. By deploying Bynn, organizations have seen dramatic improvements:
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3× more fraudulent invoices detected- 5× faster invoice approvals
- 90% less time spent on manual verifications
- Thousands of dollars saved within seconds by avoiding illegitimate payments