#fraud-prevention
Fraud Prevention
Proactive strategies and controls to prevent financial fraud in your business
Parking Garage Bookkeeping: Reconciling Cash, Card, and Validation Revenue
How parking lot and garage operators reconcile entry/exit counts, cash drops, and card settlements to catch revenue leakage, plus correct accounting for monthly permits and validations.
Scrap Metal Recycling Center Bookkeeping: Cash Purchases, Seller IDs, and Form 8300 Compliance
Forty-five states require scrap yards to keep seller-ID records, cash caps run as low as $30 (Washington), and IRS Form 8300 is due within 15 days on cash over $10,000. A practical guide to building a purchase ledger that survives police, state regulator, and IRS scrutiny.
Small Business Grant Scams: How to Spot a Fake Offer Before You Pay
No legitimate grant ever requires an upfront fee — the FTC reports nearly 30% of 2026 scam victims were first contacted on social media with losses topping $2.1 billion, and fake grant offers follow a predictable four-step script from unsolicited contact to escalating "release fees."
Visa and Mastercard Just Tightened Chargeback Monitoring Again: What the 2026 VAMP Threshold Cut Means for Merchants
Visa lowered its VAMP excessive-merchant threshold from 2.2% to 1.5% on April 1, 2026, with fines of $8 per flagged transaction, and Mastercard's Excessive Chargeback Program still triggers at 100+ monthly chargebacks — here's how the ratio math catches small merchants off guard and how to bring it back under the line.
PCI DSS 4.0 Compliance Guide for Small Merchants in 2026
PCI DSS 4.0's transition period ended March 31, 2025, so every merchant assessment from 2026 onward now enforces mandatory payment-page script monitoring, MFA for all cardholder-data access, and authenticated internal vulnerability scans — noncompliance risks $5,000-$100,000 monthly fines from acquiring banks plus an average $173,692 added breach cost per IBM's research.
Positive Pay: The Bank Service That Stops Check Fraud Before It Clears
Positive Pay is a business bank service that matches every check against your issued-check list and flags mismatches the same day, a control most eligible small business accounts still don't use even though checks remain the most-targeted form of payments fraud.
Reconciling the Robot Shopper: A Small Business Guide to AI Agent Checkout Bookkeeping
How small businesses can reconcile AI agent-initiated purchases under ACP and AP2, tag agent-channel sales, track transaction fees, and defend against the chargeback risk of non-human checkouts.
Why Regulation E Won't Save Your Business From Wire Fraud: UCC Article 4A Liability Explained
Business wire transfers are governed by UCC Article 4A, not Regulation E, meaning a company can be held liable for a fraudulent wire if its bank's security procedure was commercially reasonable, even though 86% of the FBI's $3.05 billion in 2025 BEC losses moved via wire or ACH.
AI Deepfake CEO Fraud: Wire-Transfer Controls That Actually Work
The FBI logged over 22,000 reports of AI voice or video fraud with nearly $893 million in losses in a single recent year; callback verification on a separate channel, a rotating code word, and a dollar-threshold second approver are the three no-cost controls that stop deepfake wire-transfer fraud.
Cash Over and Short: Turning Till Discrepancies Into an Audit Trail
The Cash Over and Short account records the gap between expected and actual cash counts as a debit (shortage) or credit (overage), turning routine till discrepancies into a trackable, auditable pattern instead of a buried miscellaneous expense line.
Retail Return Fraud and Wardrobing: How to Catch It in Your Books
Wardrobing and other return fraud account for roughly 10–15% of retail returns and cost U.S. retailers over $100 billion a year; reason-code tracking, customer-level return reports, and a monthly returns reserve are the bookkeeping controls that catch it before it erodes margin.
The IRS Is Overhauling Form 990: What Nonprofits Need to Know About Grants and Fiscal Sponsorship
Treasury and the IRS are restructuring Form 990 to require source-by-source government grant reporting and project-by-project fiscal sponsorship disclosure, aimed at detecting fraud in the tax-exempt sector.