Digital Transactions | Abrigo Launches an ACH Fraud Detection Solution

By Peter Lucas

Abrigo Inc., a provider of credit risk, compliance, and lending solutions for financial institutions, announced early Wednesday the launch of Abrigo Fraud Detection for ACH.

The solution detects fraud for inbound automated clearing house transactions, ACH check deposits, wire payments, and ACH origination and receipt. Support for additional payment types will be introduced throughout 2026, Abrigo says.

ACH fraud is a growing problem. In 2024, 38% of organizations experienced attempted or actual ACH fraud, up from 33% in 2023, according to the Association of Financial Professionals’ 2025 Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report. The AFP received 521 responses from treasury professionals.

Abrigo’s ACH fraud-detection service applies real-time behavioral analytics to ACH transactions to identify high-risk patterns, such as mule accounts, fan-out behavior, and unusual timing, before transactions are processed. Fan-out behavior is a tactic in which criminals disperse money fraudulently obtained from a single account across multiple, smaller accounts or send it to various recipients involved in the scam, such as money mules, to launder the money.

The solution also supports transaction-level case consolidation and optional account verification and customer confirmation. Monitoring of ACH origination and receipt activity streamlines reviews, reduces false positives, and supports evolving fraud-detection expectations from Nacha, the governing body for the ACH network, Abrigo says.

“Nacha has evolved its risk-management framework to require all financial institutions to establish and implement risk-based processes and procedures reasonably intended to identify ACH entries initiated due to fraud,” an Abrigo spokesperson says by email. “ACH volumes continue to rise, as does fraud in ACH at an even faster pace, making it imperative that we have a solution directed to this issue.”

One aspect of ACH fraud that is growing rapidly is business email compromise attacks. According to the AFP, 63% of organizations experienced business-email compromise attacks in 2024. In addition, 76% of BEC attacks involved the use of spoofed emails to deceive targets.

“Automated clearing house fraud is a rapidly growing threat as digital payments grow. While checks often account for higher total losses, ACH fraud is increasing in frequency and severity,” the Abrigo spokesperson says.

In addition to the rise in BEC, the rapid adoption of same-day ACH transactions, which totaled more than 1.2 billion payments in 2024, increases the speed at which fraud occurs, leaving less time for detection and recovery, Abrigo says.