Vendor Validations: Add BBB Resources to Combat B2B Payment Fraud

The Better Business Bureau (BBB), a nonprofit organization initially founded to combat false advertising, but now has evolved into offering a wealth of free resources and validated information to help businesses, particularly accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) teams, protect their custom and vendor master files from fraud.

Here's how the BBB can help your business stay one step ahead of fraud when onboarding customers or vendors. 

Company Profiles:  Customer & Vendor Validations

The BBB website can serve as a crucial starting point for verifying business legitimacy.  Using company profiles, you can find hundreds of thousands of businesses in the BBB database. These profiles provide valuable information to help you determine if a company is legitimate and operates with trust and ethics. Even individual contractors or sole proprietorships operating as companies can have a profile, allowing you to validate their legitimacy. 

When onboarding new U.S. vendors or customers, it's essential to ensure they are real entities or individuals with validated information. 

Search by the type of business, business name, keywords, phone number, website address, or email address in the search bar.  Find out whether the business an accredited businesses and see their BBB rating along with reviews and complaints.   

• Accredited Businesses: Information for BBB Accredited Businesses is often more up-to-date and thoroughly vetted, as these businesses have gone through a rigorous process to meet BBB standards of trust. The BBB verifies information with state licensing boards and corporate documents
• BBB Rating:  Represent the BBB's opinion of how the business is likely to interact with its customers. Ratings are from A+ (highest) to F (lowest). In some cases, BBB will not rate the business (indicated by an NR, or "No Rating") for reasons that include insufficient information about a business or ongoing review/update of the business's file.

The company profile also provides information that can be used for verifying supporting documentation received for adding a new customer or vendor, verifying what is currently in your customer or vendor record, or checking against a suspicious email:

Give.Org:  Make Sure That Charity is Real Before Making Payments

How do you know that the charity your company is giving to is real?  This is a question at any time of the year when fraudulent charities suddenly appear following natural disasters, or just in time for Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Every year Giving Tuesday is a global initiative where people are encouraged to give to charities, and some companies match employee donations.  For 2025, it will be Tuesday, December 2, 2025.

It is critical before making payments to charities, to verify that the charity is real. Businesses can go further to verify that even though the charity is real, that it is still accepting donations and that the donations help those that it purports to help. 

The BBB has set up a separate site https://www.give.org where you can search your charity by name or click the A-Z National Charity Reports to select from the list. Either search will check against the BBB’s database and provide a report that covers the activities of the charity including the number of BBB complaints for the year.  It also indicates whether the charity is accredited by the BBB. 

Conclusion

Utilizing the resources provided by the Better Business Bureau is essential for businesses to avoid fraud.  BBB company profiles and charity reports offer reliable, up-to-date information, helping teams in accounts payable and receivable avoid fraud and validate new customers, vendors, and charitable organizations.  In a time where payment fraud and fake charities are increasingly sophisticated, BBB resources serve as a trusted source of validated information.

 Stay tuned for an upcoming podcast with a deep dive on free BBB fraud resources and tools!

Sources: 

1. Better Business Bureau (BBB):  https://www.bbb.org
2. Giving Tuesday:  https://www.givingtuesday.org/