SAN DIEGO—If you think today’s fraudster is some dude in black sunglasses sitting in front of a bright monitor in a dark basement, you’re mistaken.

“Now we’re talking about an international syndicate. We’re talking about organized crime syndicates with quarterly goals—up against your customer’s AP clerk. This is not a fair fight,” said Angela Sarno, Vice President, Marketing, at PaymentWorks, a digital vendor onboarding platform and Nacha Preferred Partner. 

Sarno warned there’s no fraud too big or too small for today’s crooks, noting last year PaymentWorks stopped payments ranging from an $11 million attempt to a $1,400 try. “Everybody is now in their crosshairs,” she told the April 29 session “Turning Fraud Monitoring Rules into a Strategic Advantage” at Smarter Faster Payments 2026.

Implementation of Nacha’s Fraud Monitoring Rules began in March and continues in June.

“The premise behind the new Rules set is to establish a risk management framework that’s reasonably designed and intended to identify fraud events and then follow appropriate process and procedure to act upon them,” said Mark Dixon, Senior Consultant at Nacha Consulting. 

That includes establishing “a baseline of normal activity—expected behavior versus anomalous activity,” said Dixon. “While the Rules don’t require a fraud event to be identified before it is transmitted through the Network, the goal behind this is to reduce successful fraud events, so a proactive approach is actually ideal, because if you’re reacting to fraud, you’re usually catching it after the fact and may not have an optimal recovery path.”

And Dixon said one excellent way of reducing your fraud risk is to ditch checks.

“The majority of fraud is check fraud,” Dixon said, citing research from the Association for Financial Professionals which found that 58% of organizations reporting being victimized by check fraud in 2025. “The more you can migrate away from the check side, you are automatically reducing the instances of fraud that you’re going to experience,” said Dixon, also noting the benefits of ACH payments, including safety, remittance data, and its cost-effectiveness.