How should organisations reduce crypto scam losses before transfers happen?

Why Pre-Transfer Controls Matter More Than Recovery

Crypto scam losses are usually unrecoverable once a transfer leaves the organisation, so the control objective is to interrupt authorisation before funds move. That makes pre-transfer verification a fraud-prevention and governance problem, not just a finance process issue. Stronger checks are most valuable when the payment is unusual, the beneficiary is new, or the request carries urgency or impersonation pressure. OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is relevant where payment workflows depend on service accounts, APIs, or automation that can be abused to approve or route transfers incorrectly. In practice, many organisations discover weaknesses only after a convincing impersonation or destination-change request has already triggered an irreversible payment.

How Organisations Build Pre-Transfer Friction Without Slowing Everything Down

The practical goal is not to make every payment harder. It is to make the risky ones harder while keeping routine transfers fast. Organisations usually get better results by combining beneficiary validation, step-up approval, and behavioural detection into a single decision point before release. That means the workflow should treat a new destination, a changed account number, a first-time counterparty, or an unusual amount as a reason to pause and verify, rather than as a normal exception to be processed later.

Good verification is layered. One layer checks whether the request itself fits known behaviour. Another confirms the payment destination through an out-of-band channel or approved directory. A third layer ensures the approver is genuinely authorised and not acting under impersonation or account compromise. Where fraud pressure is high, organisations also monitor for signals such as unusual time-of-day submission, repeated urgency language, or a payment pattern that departs from the sender’s history. Those signals are most useful when they trigger review, not automatic blocking in every case.

A useful operating model is:

• Pause first-time or changed beneficiaries until independently validated.
• Apply stronger approval thresholds to high-value or high-risk transfers.
• Require separate confirmation when the request arrives through email, chat, or another easily impersonated channel.
• Log the verification path so the organisation can prove who approved what, when, and on what evidence.

Teams also need to connect payment controls to identity assurance. If the approval path does not know whether the requester, approver, or automated actor is properly authenticated and current, the fraud control becomes a paperwork layer rather than a prevention control. The guidance breaks down when organisations rely on manual review alone, because manual checks do not scale well against fast-moving impersonation scams.

Where Pre-Transfer Verification Gets Harder in Real Operations

Tighter payment controls often increase friction and escalation volume, so organisations have to balance loss prevention against business speed and user experience. That tradeoff is especially visible in treasury, procurement, and executive payment flows where urgency is common and people expect exceptions. The right response is not to weaken the control, but to define which exceptions are genuinely acceptable and which should always trigger independent confirmation.

There are also edge cases where the scam pattern is not obvious. Some fraudulent requests use a legitimate business context, such as a supplier change, merger-related payment instruction, or time-sensitive settlement, so simple keyword detection will miss them. Guidance here is still evolving, and organisations should treat any claim of “fully automated scam detection” with caution unless it is backed by strong beneficiary validation and human escalation for ambiguous cases. The common mistake is to optimise only for speed and assume that post-transfer investigation can recover the loss. It usually cannot.

Practitioner takeaway: organisations should design payment controls so that uncertainty delays release before money moves, because the cheapest scam loss is the one that never clears authorisation.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should crypto platforms reduce scam losses without slowing legitimate users?
• How can organisations reduce identity risk before buying more tools?
• How can organisations reduce leakage before AI responses are generated?
• How can organisations reduce insider risk in crypto asset handling workflows?