Seventy-four percent of finance professionals report that their companies were victims of payments fraud in 2016, according to the AFP.
The association says scams in which cybercriminals send fake emails from a top executive to initiate wire transfers are becoming increasingly prevalent.
Spear phishing attacks prey on the fact that employees want to please a superior or some other high-level executive.
Hackers duped the company, Ubiquiti Networks, into transferring money to accounts overseas.
They hack into companies' email, pretend to be senior executives and direct employees to make bogus financial transactions.
Companies are slowly converting check payments into wire-transfer, ACH-debit and purchasing-card transactions.
