79% of organizations experienced payments fraud in 2024.
Nearly four out of five finance teams were targeted by payment fraud last year, according to the Association for Financial Professionals’ 2025 Payments Fraud and Control Survey. Business Email Compromise (BEC) accounted for the majority of attacks, while wire transfers surpassed ACH as the most attacked payment method. Recovery rates are declining. Only 22% of organizations managed to recover at least 75% of lost funds, down from 41% the year before.
This is the environment AP teams are working in. What makes this environment especially challenging isn't just the volume of attacks, it's the timing. Fraudsters have identified a vulnerability window they exploit when vigilance is lowest: “The Friday Funnel.”
Fraudsters do not send phishing emails at random. They engineer them for maximum impact. Late Friday afternoons are particularly vulnerable because:
AP teams face additional natural exposure through transaction-heavy workflows, email-driven communication, and trust-based executive requests that make fraud easy to slip through. Over a third of BEC attempts occur on Fridays, when processes are rushed and oversight is stretched thin.
Fraudsters focus on AP because this is where the money moves every day. Wire transfers, their preferred method, offer little chance of recovery once funds are sent. That combination of timing and inherent exposure creates the funnel scammers rely on.
The Friday Funnel has already cost organizations billions.
Real-world cases include:
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reports that global exposed losses from BEC scams have exceeded $55 billion since 2013.
But the financial hit is only the beginning. Fraud events trigger forensic audits, weaken vendor trust, damage reputations, and add stress for AP teams who are often left wondering what more they could have done. For public-facing organizations like schools, municipalities, and hospitals, the reputational fallout often lingers far longer than the fraud itself.
Fraud looks a little different depending on the industry, but the Friday Funnel makes every sector more vulnerable. Attackers know that when teams are rushing to close the week, details get overlooked and controls get bypassed.
Across industries, the pattern is the same: fraud succeeds when urgency and trust overpower process, and the end of the week gives criminals the perfect opening.
Gone are the days of typo-ridden spam. In 2024, 40% of BEC emails were AI-generated, making them polished, convincing, and difficult to distinguish from legitimate requests.
Compounding the risk, Vendor Email Compromise (VEC), where attackers hijack actual vendor accounts, spiked nearly 50% year-over-year. When a request for new bank details comes from a legitimate vendor address at 4:45 p.m. on Friday, human defenses are often at their weakest.
While AP clerks press “send,” the fallout ultimately lands with finance leadership. Fraud does not just impact operations; it affects governance and strategy.
Fraud management has become a board-level priority, requiring stronger analytics, governance, and investment in resilient controls. For CFOs, Friday Funnel scams highlight gaps in resilience that ripple well beyond AP.
Given these board-level implications, many CFOs are turning to automation not just as an operational improvement, but as a critical risk management strategy.
Training employees matters, but fraudsters exploit timing, fatigue, and pressure, which are factors training alone cannot fix. Automation provides guardrails that stay in place even when humans are stretched.
Organizations that strengthen their automation frameworks often see fraud-related losses drop significantly, in some cases by as much as 25–30%.
Fraud protection is the urgent case for automation, but the strategic benefits extend further.
Automation supports:
Fraud prevention is the immediate payoff. Long-term, automation empowers finance teams to operate with greater accuracy, confidence, and strategic agility.
The Friday Funnel exists because fraudsters understand human patterns: rushed Fridays, missing approvers, and a fatigue-induced drop in scrutiny. These conditions can create openings that lead to reputational strain, vendor frustration, and financial challenges.
Closing that funnel isn’t about blame. It’s about putting structure in place so teams can stay protected even when pressure peaks. Automation makes that possible by validating vendors, flagging anomalies, and enforcing approval workflows that hold firm when human focus fades.
For finance leaders ready to build systematic defenses against Friday fraud, our post 'From Gut Check to Game Plan' shows how automation moves AP teams beyond risky gut decisions to foolproof processes that work even when pressure peaks.