NEW ORLEANS—It’s bad enough when anyone falls victim to credit-push fraud, but some cases really make Tim Thorson’s blood boil.

“Credit-push fraud can take a small business down. I’ve seen it happen,” said Thorson, Senior Vice President, Digital Payments, Regions Financial Corporation. “The other side of that is the elderly. I’m extremely upset when I see the elderly have their life savings taken away by this.” 

While credit-push fraud is unlikely to go away, there’s hope that new Nacha Rules taking effect next year can at least help put a dent in it. That was the focus of an April 27 session at Smarter Faster Payments 2025, “Nacha Credit Push Fraud Rule Implementation Dates Are Fast Approaching - Stay on Track.”

Hopefully, your financial institution is well on the road to implementation, but for those who need to get going, the panel offered advice. William Mills, Vice President, Deposit and ACH Operations, Premier Banks, called it “a daunting task for an RDFI,” which led Premier to take a phased approach. Phase one involves seeing what you can do today. Premier began by running a daily report gathering every transaction from every account over $5,000.

“I can send it to the branch managers and say, ‘I need you to look at every single transaction on this list and tell me if there’s something weird going on here.’ They know their customer; I don’t know their customer,” said Mills. The list comes with instructions to call if something looks amiss. 

“That $5,000 threshold is high for catching most of the fraud that’s going on. But that’s all I can do right now because that ends up being about 150 to 200 items per branch per day,” said Mills. “They can’t do more than that.” 

The next phase involves looking at what Premier can do with the technology it has to lower the threshold, perhaps halving it to $2,500. Mills said this might involve having his ACH Operations and Deposit Operations teams review those transactions and send any that raise eyebrows for further review. Down the road, Mills hopes a tech-based solution will help.  

Thorson said an approach like that would be impossible at Regions because of his bank’s size. Instead, “It’s going to have to be done programmatically. It has to be automated. And it has to be statistical,” said Thorson. 

“We’re going to be setting it up where the thresholds are what we consider to be reasonable and what we can handle.” 

For all the new rules, Thorson believes there’s something else that needs to happen to not only fight credit-push fraud, but to make things better for all bank customers and credit union members: cooperation among financial institutions.

To that end, the panelists pointed to the ACH Contact Registry in Nacha’s Risk Management Portal. It’s a Nacha Rules requirement for financial institutions to provide phone numbers and email addresses—monitored during business hours—for ACH operations and fraud/risk management, and to keep them current. 

“Just pick up the phone. The information is right there at your fingertips,” said Dominic Plumeri, Vice President, Member Services, Southern Financial Exchange. “You can reach out timely to the institution if fraud is occurring.” 

Learn more about the new Nacha Rules on the Nacha website.

Visit Nacha’s Risk Management Resource Center for helpful tools.