A company approves a wire transfer to an overseas supplier. The invoice is real, the supplier is real, the amount matches the contract. The only thing that changed is the bank account number, and it changed because an email arrived from the managing director’s own address, in his own phrasing, referring to a thread the two of them actually had a few weeks earlier. Nobody picked up the phone. The money left the island.

On 4 August, during Black Hat week in Las Vegas, the red team at security firm Barracuda published a step by step demonstration of exactly that sequence. What they used to pull it off was not malware. It was an AI assistant, the same kind your business may have switched on last quarter.

For eleven weeks this column has been about pointing AI at your own work. This week, the other side of the table. The tools that make your finance team faster are making fraud faster in the same way, and the gap between those two speeds is where the money goes missing.