CEO fraud: how companies are tricked out of millions

Fraud against companies is getting more sophisticated — and one of the most effective approaches is CEO fraud. Fraudsters hijack or impersonate a CEO’s email address and send credible payment instructions to the finance team.

Let me tell you about a real case we recently heard about.

An email from the “CEO” — and the money was gone

An accounting firm received an email from their client’s CEO instructing them to pay a large supplier invoice. Everything looked correct. The invoice was attached, the tone was familiar, the amount high — but not unreasonable. Because the company normally approved payments by email, nobody reacted. The invoice was authorised and the payment went through.

The problem? The email was fake.

The CEO’s email account had been compromised, and the invoice was entirely fabricated. The result: a six-figure payout straight to the fraudster’s account. That the company usually used email to authorise invoices made it hard to spot the scam in time.

And this is unfortunately not an isolated case.

An article in Tidningen Näringslivet describes a similar fraud where a company was tricked out of two million kronor via compromised communication. The fraudsters worked methodically, used the right language and found the answer to the company’s control question in earlier email threads. The result was a significant financial loss — that could have been avoided.

Why CEO fraud is so hard to stop

What makes this type of fraud so effective is that it exploits the company’s own routines. Everything follows familiar patterns: an email from the right person, in the right tone, at the right time.

It is rarely about carelessness — someone was simply doing their job, exactly as usual.

How Vidd can help prevent this kind of attack

To reduce the risk of CEO fraud, companies need more layers of security — without making everyday work harder. That is why we at Vidd have built features that make it easy to introduce controls that cannot be bypassed with a fake email.

With Vidd you can:

• Add extra approval requirements for high-risk payments

• Require BankID signing for selected suppliers or amount thresholds

• Block payouts to accounts that do not match registered supplier details

• Get automatic warnings on unusual patterns in invoices and payment flows

The system adapts to your business and works in the background — so nothing is forgotten, and errors do not slip through.

A safer everyday — without extra work

At Vidd we believe security should not be an obstacle — it should just be there. With the right tools you can prevent fraud without slowing the pace of everyday work.

Want to know how you can protect your company from CEO fraud and other digital threats? Get in touch — we are happy to tell you more.

Filip Sandström, CEO