Year-End Fraud Pressure: Executive Spoofing and Gift Card Attacks

The end of the year brings more than celebrations. It creates high-risk conditions for financial fraud — when executives are traveling, teams are short-staffed, and approval workflows are rushed.

While phishing remains the #1 initial attack vector (Verizon DBIR), year-end business email compromise (BEC) campaigns now exploit something different: predictable stress and urgency during the holiday window.

These attacks are becoming:

This week we’re breaking down why year-end fraud surges — and what IT and security leaders can do about it before the books close.

Attackers spoof executives because authority + urgency bypass critical thinking.

Business Email Compromise caused over $2.9B in reported losses in 2023 (FBI IC3), making it one of the costliest enterprise threats — and the FBI has repeatedly noted spikes during holiday periods.

BEC succeeds because it weaponizes trust, not technology.

Gift card scams sound outdated — but they persist because they blend seamlessly into year-end business routines.

Research from the ACFE shows fraud attempts increase during staffing shortages and calendar transitions, and invoice spoofing remains one of the fastest-growing vectors in BEC.

The holidays are when mistakes happen quietly — and attackers know it.

Deloitte’s payment fraud research found executive-impersonation attempts spike during quarter-close periods, when controls loosen under pressure.

Attackers track seasonal workflows and adapt campaigns to them. Year-end bookkeeping isn’t just a process vulnerability — it’s a predictable threat window.

Holiday BEC works because it relies on human instinct, not technical compromise.

The attacker’s advantage isn’t sophistication — it’s timing and automation.

Meanwhile defenders struggle because the burden falls on people making fast decisions, not systems blocking malicious ones.

• require verbal verification for executive transfers
• enforce dual approval workflows for first-time vendor payments
• block external senders using internal-domain look-alikes
• flag mobile-device approvals during executive travel
• alert on mailbox rule changes + forwarding configuration

Technical safeguards to implement now:

These controls reduce risk without slowing business operations — which is critical during end-of-year deadlines.

Require escalation for gift card requests.

90% of organizations that implement this control report dramatically reduced gift card fraud pressure.

Small friction → big reduction in social engineering risk.

Kaden Rourke is a Senior Security Engineer with 12+ years of experience designing and implementing secure authentication systems used by millions of users worldwide. Before joining Everykey, Elias led identity engineering initiatives at two venture-backed SaaS companies and contributed to open-source projects focused on hardware-backed cryptography and decentralized access control.

Year-end cyber fraud succeeds not because controls fail —
but because process discipline collapses under pressure.

As attackers move toward automated social engineering workflows, defenses must shift to automated verification and identity-aware anomaly detection — especially during seasonal capacity strain.

Stay curious. Stay prepared.

Until next time,

Check out last week’s edition of Unlocked

AI has changed how consumers shop by speeding up research. But one thing hasn’t changed: shoppers still trust people more than AI.

Levanta’s new Affiliate 3.0 Consumer Report reveals a major shift in how shoppers blend AI tools with human influence. Consumers use AI to explore options, but when it comes time to buy, they still turn to creators, communities, and real experiences to validate their decisions.

The data shows:

The most effective brands are combining AI discovery with authentic human influence to drive measurable conversions.

Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified by it.

Download the full report to see what this means for your brand.