Not A Deepfake: The Executive Impersonation Slipping Past Finance

Deepfakes get the headlines, so that’s where the worry goes: the strange phone call, the video meeting that feels off. Meanwhile the fraud that’s actually moving money arrives as an invoice or an email thread. Of the 597 payment fraud incidents we analyzed in the first half of 2026, roughly 255 used an attack we’ve named Ghost Executive.

In this episode, we take one apart: the invoice, the W-9, and the CEO approval that never happened, every piece built to pass the checks most finance teams run.

You’ll learn:

• What most controls miss about a Ghost Executive attack — and what catches it
• Why a fabricated email thread reads as a conversation that already happened
• How complete paperwork gets treated as proof instead of a claim to verify