ONTARIO, Calif.—California credit unions recently received a blunt warning from federal law enforcement: financial fraud is accelerating, becoming more sophisticated, and increasingly costly for institutions and members.
During a virtual briefing with agents from the FBI’s Sacramento Field Office, credit union leaders were briefed on the year’s most damaging cybercrime trends — and the tactics regulators say financial institutions must prepare for now, California’s Credit Unions reported.
Organized for credit unions across the FBI Sacramento service area, including Bakersfield and Fresno, the session served as both an intelligence exchange and a frontline feedback loop, giving law enforcement visibility into the threats credit unions are confronting daily.
BEC And Investment Fraud Driving Record Losses
The FBI underscored the scale of financial crime flowing through the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The IC3 has logged over 4.8 million complaints since 2000, averaging 758,000 a year over the last five years. But agents emphasized that losses — not volume — are now the biggest red flag.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) remains one of the most expensive attack vectors. In 2024, BEC was the second-highest source of financial losses, with complaints topping $2.7 billion in reported adjusted losses. Agents outlined frequent BEC techniques, including:
- Bogus invoice schemes—compromising vendor or employee emails to reroute payments
- CEO fraud—impersonating executives to authorize fraudulent wire transfers
- W-2 and gift card requests—fraudulent attempts to obtain employee data or high-value prepaid cards
Investment fraud — especially crypto-based scams — is also surging. Agents highlighted “Operation Level Up,” launched in early 2024 to identify victims of “pig butchering” schemes, where criminals build long-term relationships with targets before steering them into fraudulent cryptocurrency platforms.
RAT Team: A Critical Link In Recovering Fraudulent Transfers
A major focus was the IC3 Recovery Asset Team (RAT), formed in 2018 to accelerate coordination between financial institutions and the FBI. RAT helps freeze illicit domestic transfers and plays a key role in the “financial fraud kill chain.”
Its objectives include:
- Identifying potentially fraudulent accounts across the sector
- Staying ahead of emerging fraud trends
- Strengthening real-time information sharing between institutions and federal agents
Agents also noted expanding international coordination, pointing to joint work with Indian law enforcement since 2022 that has resulted in raids and arrests tied to cyber-enabled financial crime and transnational call-center fraud.