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The heist doesn’t kick in a door—it slips into your inbox, borrows your boss’s voice, and asks you to hurry. We walk through a Texas family business that lost $150K to a “new wiring instructions” email and another $50K after an uncannily perfect phone call that sounded exactly like the CEO. The setup felt normal, the tone was familiar, and the urgency was believable. By the time anyone paused, the money had crossed borders and the vendors still wanted to be paid.
From there, we zoom out to the bigger picture: deepfake-enabled fraud is accelerating, with losses climbing into the hundreds of millions and average hits per company reaching painful territory. We share how criminals scrape podcasts, social posts, and voicemails to build voice clones, then layer old-school social engineering on top for a brutal one-two punch. The takeaway isn’t panic—it’s precision. Awareness still beats any firewall when you pair it with simple, enforceable rules: verify payment changes via a known number, train often in short bursts, add out-of-band callbacks, and slow down urgent money movement with dual approvals.
We also break down the insurance that actually helps when things go sideways. Most standard business policies won’t touch cyber losses; you need cyber liability with both first-party and third-party protection. And for 2025, social engineering fraud and fund transfer fraud coverage aren’t optional—they’re the core. We explain limits, exclusions, and conditions like MFA, training, and offline backups that can decide whether a claim gets paid. Along the way we cover premium drivers, sector risks, and the practical steps to take minutes after a hit. Subscribe, share this with your finance lead, and leave a review with one safeguard your team commits to this week—what’s your out-of-band verification rule?

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Chapters

1. Cold Open: The Cyber Heist (00:00:00)

2. The Texas Vendor Scam (00:01:52)

3. “It Was AI”: Voice-Cloned CEO (00:02:55)

4. The Scale of Deepfake Losses (00:04:06)

5. Human Firewall: Practical Defenses (00:05:27)

6. What Cyber Insurance Really Covers (00:06:32)

7. Social Engineering Fraud Coverage (00:08:32)

8. Premium Drivers and Requirements (00:09:56)

8 episodes