Using AI for Email Risk Reviews: A New Fraud Defense for Vendor Teams

July 22, 2026

Payment fraud often starts with an email that looks routine and legitimate. For vendor teams, every banking change, remittance update, or contact change deserves careful review. This article explains why a separate email risk review is needed, and how using approved artificial intelligence (AI) tools to perform the review can help detect hidden red flags before a fraudulent request is processed.

A Second Set of Eyes

Fraudsters are already using AI tools to make attacks faster, cleaner, and more convincing. That means the obvious warning signs are disappearing. A fraudulent message may no longer contain misspelled words or awkward grammar. It may come from the vendor’s actual email account. It may reference real people, real invoices, real projects, or a legitimate vendor relationship. It may even arrive as part of a multi-step conversation designed to build trust before the actual bank change request is submitted.

For these reasons and more, vendor team members need a separate email risk review to serve as a second set of eyes to detect red flags hiding in fraudulent emails that appear to be legitimate before someone acts on them.

Fraudster Tactics That Email Risk Reviews With AI Tools Can Detect

Just as fraudsters use AI tools to make suspicious emails look legitimate, vendor teams can use approved AI tools to look for slight nuances that may not be apparent to the human eye or that require connection to other emails.

Here are some common tactics that fraudsters use and how an email risk review using AI tools assists in detecting red flags:

1. Spoofed Email — Fraudsters create a domain with an additional letter or a letter or set of letters that mimic a real letter in the vendors domain. They then create an email address that looks legitimate to the human eye. This can be as simple as replacing a lower case “l” with an upper case “I,” using two “v’s” for a “w,” or an “r+n” for an ‘m”.

AI Email Risk Review: Check the email address for any misspelled words or compare it to the vendor’s real email address by copying and pasting it into your AI tool. Scan the email account for any emails from that same mimicked email address and compare them to the real vendor’s email address to identify differences in email address format and volume as a red flag for fraud.

2. Conversation Gap — A fraudster may first send a request to update vendor contact information. Later, they send a separate request to update banking details. If those messages are not connected in the reviewer’s inbox, the employee may not realize the new phone number or email address was also fraudulently supplied. A callback control can fail if the confirmation is made using information provided by the fraudster.

AI Email Risk Review: Scan the email account for any related requests based on vendor name, sender’s email address, or other data to find the previous request to change contact information. If found, that can be a red flag for fraud.

3. Email From Real Vendor’s Email Account — With access to phish users or purchase usernames and passwords, fraudsters may have access to your vendor’s email account and send a request to make changes. Many fraudsters go a step further by sending the request from a historical email string to make the request appear even more legitimate.

AI Email Risk Review: Scan the email account for any emails from the vendor’s domain and look for changes in email tone, wording, number of requests and contact information. By checking all emails from the vendor's domain, red flags related to impersonation or account compromise can be identified early.

In these scenarios, a “second set of eyes” can be critical to detecting a fraudulent request before it is processed. The AI email risk review process is a fraud prevention defense that can be performed with chat prompts in AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini. To see a demo of these scenarios in each tool, register for the IOFM webinar linked below.

Conclusion

Fraudsters are already using AI to improve their attacks, so likewise, vendor teams should be using AI to strengthen their defenses. Using AI as a second set of eyes to detect red flags through a separate email risk review process is a practical way to detect suspicious emails before action is taken. In today’s payment environment, that extra review may be the difference between stopping fraud and funding it.