B2B fraud tactics and how criminals are committing fraud is changing constantly, criminal groups are now combining AI, deepfakes, supply-chain compromise and highly personalised social engineering to target businesses at scale. Traditional defensive tools like standalone antivirus, basic email filters or disjointed security policies no longer offer enough protection to properly defend your business against a fraud attempt.
We’ve taken a look at all of the latest B2B fraud tactics and summarised a list that we believe your business should be on the look out for as we approach the end of February.
AI‑driven phishing & Business Email Compromise [BEC]
Criminals are using generative AI, deepfake voice and video manipulation to impersonate CEOs, suppliers and finance leaders with realistic scams that require you to think twice about who it’s coming from.
- Deepfake‑assisted BEC has already diverted significant funds, with cases in 2026 showing attackers impersonating executives to authorise transfers
- AI is producing hyper‑personalised phishing emails that bypass traditional detection and mimic internal communication patterns
- BEC remains one of the costliest and fastest‑growing attack categories worldwide [Sophos]
Why it matters: these attacks look and sound exactly like trusted partners, making manual verification almost impossible without layered controls.
Supply Chain Attacks becoming industrial‑scale
Supply‑chain fraud is now a primary global threat.
- Cyber criminals are weaponising compromised vendors, SaaS platforms, dev pipelines and CI/CD systems to infiltrate downstream businesses
- Identity abuse, OAuth token theft, and lateral movement are used to compromise hundreds of organisations from a single weak point
- Large organisations cite supply-chain vulnerabilities as their most significant cyber resilience challenge in 2026 [Sophos]
Why it matters: even organisations with strong internal security can be breached through a trusted partner, assessing your third-party vulnerabilities crucial. CSG offers this as a service as part of our managed services so that you can have peace of mind in the businesses you do business with.
Cyber‑enabled fraud overtaking Ransomware
Fraud has now dethroned ransomware as the top executive cyber concern.
- Microsoft blocked nearly £3million in fraud attempts between April 2024 and April 2025, according to its Cyber Signals report. This included 49,000 fraudulent partner enrolments and 1.6 million bot sign‑up attempts per hour
- Techniques include invoice fraud, payment redirection, credential theft and multi‑channel social engineering [email, VoIP, messaging apps]
- Sophos reports how Business Email Compromise [BEC] is continuing to rise sharply, becoming a growing proportion of initial compromises used for credential theft, social engineering and financial fraud. This demonstrates that fraud‑oriented attacks [like impersonation and payment diversion] remain a top and expanding risk
Why it matters: fraud is becoming more profitable, scalable and harder to detect than ransomware – making it the preferred tactic for organised crime
Synthetic identities & deepfake-driven impersonation
Fraudsters are now assembling B2B fraud tactics with AI‑driven synthetic identities that behave like legitimate employees, suppliers or customers.
Microsoft reports that AI‑powered scams are generating convincing fake websites, job applicants, customer service bots and other digital personas, enabling criminals to scale fraud rapidly and at low cost. In just one year, Microsoft blocked nearly £3million in fraud attempts, including 1.6 million bot sign‑up attempts per hour, showing how automated identity fabrication is accelerating globally.
Sophos threat intelligence shows that attackers increasingly rely on BEC and adversary‑in‑the‑middle MFA token theft to hijack identities and create fraudulent access profiles. These growing methods allow criminals to appear as legitimate internal users or trusted suppliers, enabling credential theft, payment redirection and unauthorised financial activity.
Why it matters: when attackers can manufacture or impersonate “legitimate” digital entities, they gain the ability to:
- Open fraudulent accounts or credit lines using AI‑generated identities
- Create credible supplier or contractor profiles that pass verification
- Manipulate financial workflows, such as payment approvals or invoice redirection, by impersonating employees or trusted partners
Ransomware + data theft + fraud hybrid attacks
Modern ransomware groups increasingly pair extortion with financial fraud, creating hybrid attack chains that continue long after the initial incident.
Sophos reports that ransomware remains the most significant threat to SMEs, making up 70% of all incident response cases for small businesses and over 90% for midsized businesses [Sophos]. These attacks frequently involve data theft alongside encryption, giving criminals the information they need to conduct downstream fraud and impersonation campaigns.
Why it matters: even when organisations refuse to pay ransom, exfiltrated data becomes a long‑term asset for cyber criminals. Sophos shows that this data is repurposed to:
- refine impersonation attempts
- sustain social-engineering campaigns
- execute financial fraud schemes
This can be carried out often months after the initial breach, making ransomware not just a one‑time event, but the starting point of an extended fraud lifecycle.
Compromised cloud identities & MFA attacks
Datto‑aligned research highlights the growing prevalence of MFA fatigue attacks, where attackers use stolen usernames and passwords to bombard users with repeated MFA prompts until one is approved, enabling account takeover and subsequent unauthorised access to Microsoft 365 or cloud resources. These attacks frequently lead to data leaks, BEC incidents, and cloud account compromise.
Identity compromise has become the primary attack surface [Datto], with more than 60% of investigated incidents tracing back to identity‑related weaknesses rather than malware. Threat actors commonly bypass MFA using adversary‑in‑the‑middle [AiTM] kits and then leverage legitimate cloud privileges to move laterally, manipulate accounts and commit financial fraud.
Why it matters: once an attacker successfully poses as a legitimate user, traditional detection tools struggle to distinguish malicious activity from real business operations. This enables:
- Invoice tampering and payment redirection
- Data exfiltration under trusted identities
- Fraudulent approvals and workflow manipulation
With Microsoft, Datto and Sophos all confirming that identity, not malware, now sits at the centre of cloud‑based fraud, your business must treat identity security as a priority.
Why only a full-rounded approach works
2026 fraud tactics work because attackers exploit gaps, between teams, tools, vendors and processes.
- Attackers are faster and more adaptive than isolated defensive tools
- Businesses lacking integrated fraud, identity, and cyber controls face exponentially higher risk
At CSG we help close these gaps by delivering an end‑to‑end security ecosystem, combining technology, policy, monitoring, governance, training and vendor oversight.
We believe that this is the only viable defence against B2B fraud tactics such as AI-driven, multi-vector B2B fraud in 2026. But don’t be alarmed as we can help you with your plan to fighting against fraud attempts today.
