For years, encrypted email and phone call-backs were the standard for "secure" wire instructions. They checked a box, made everyone feel responsible, and looked good on an audit trail.
But today's attackers don't play by yesterday's rules. They don't need to break the encryption. They just need to fool a person.
✉️ Encryption Protects Messages, Not Identity
Here's the uncomfortable truth: encryption secures the content of a message, not the person sending it.
An encrypted email only guarantees that someone can read the message. It doesn't confirm that the person behind the keyboard is who they claim to be. Once an attacker gains access to a real user's inbox through phishing or credential theft, they can send "encrypted" messages that look perfectly legitimate.
And mailbox compromise is easier than most people think. Attackers don't need sophisticated zero-day exploits. They just need a weak password, a shared credential exposed in a previous breach, or SMS-based two-factor authentication vulnerable to SIM swapping.
Even organizations with documented security protocols get breached, because those controls assume the communication channel itself is trustworthy. It's not.
Encryption offers privacy. It doesn't offer proof.
👨🏻 Human Verification Is the Weak Link
Call-backs feel like due diligence. In practice, they're just another exploit vector.
If a fraudster provides a phone number in a seemingly legitimate email and someone calls to "verify" the instructions, the attacker simply answers. Even if the correct number is used, skilled social engineers can mimic tone, timing, and context convincingly enough to establish trust.
They've studied how your organization communicates: who calls whom, when wires go out, how people speak. What feels like verification often becomes manipulation.
Manual verification also depends on perfect human execution during high-stakes or fast-moving deals. Under time pressure, steps get skipped or rushed. Fatigue and multitasking erode process discipline. Fraudsters exploit the urgency by sending "last-minute" updates and counting on you to go with the flow rather than stopping to verify.
Here's how it happens in practice:
An accounting manager receives wire instructions in an encrypted email. The email address looks right. She calls the number in the signature to confirm. A friendly voice verifies the account details, because the attacker set up a Google Voice number three days ago and has been monitoring the email thread. The wire goes out. By the time anyone notices, the funds are already layered through four countries.
⚠️ You're Not Verifying What Matters
Neither encrypted email nor a call-back establishes a verifiable chain linking identity, instruction, and payment.
There's no structured audit trail connecting the verified identity of the sender to the exact wire instructions. Instructions can be intercepted, altered, or replaced between communications. Even a phone confirmation can't cryptographically link that call to the specific payment details.
And even if you trust the sender, you still haven't verified the destination account.
A fraudster can provide valid routing and account numbers, just not ones owned by the intended payee. Neither encryption nor a phone call confirms ownership. Without automated account validation like micro-deposits or verified bank linking, you don't know who controls the destination account.
The numbers tell the story: cyber-enabled fraud accounted for 83% of all losses reported to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2024, totaling over $16.6 billion. That's a 33% year-over-year increase.
And only 19% of organizations that experience wire fraud recover all their losses.
🎯 Modern Transaction Fraud Is Coordinated
Attackers don't use just one medium. They compromise inboxes, hijack phone numbers, spoof systems, intercept SMS, and infiltrate document portals simultaneously.
A single encrypted email or phone call can't outsmart a coordinated, multi-channel campaign. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns that SIM-swapping attacks and MFA push-bombing remain widely used by threat actors, particularly for high-value targets. Internal insiders at wireless carriers have been paid off to enable crypto heists through SIM swaps.
Security is only as good as the weakest link. And in a system built on encrypted emails and manual call-backs, that weak link is human trust layered on top of compromised infrastructure.
⭐️ What Transaction Verification Should Actually Look Like
Wire fraud today isn't a technical glitch. It's a systemic vulnerability in how money moves and instructions are communicated.
The problem isn't that your team isn't careful enough. It's that the system you're working in was never designed for this threat landscape.
The solution isn't another layer of manual checks. It's moving transactions to a platform where verification is built in from the start.
That's what Basefund was built for:
- Identity-verified participants. No impersonation, no compromised email accounts posing as legitimate users.
- Validated bank accounts. Every destination account is verified before a transaction, not after the money's gone.
- Closed, auditable environment. Every instruction and communication lives in a secure platform with a cryptographic audit trail, eliminating the need for unsecured emails or phone call-backs.
You can keep layering manual checks on top of a broken system, or you can move transactions to a network where identity, account ownership, and communication are verified by design.
Basefund isn't a security add-on. It's the foundation of your transaction security.
Learn more about how Basefund secures high-value transactions →
