Fraud Is a Revenue Problem and Your CRO Should Own It

For decades, fraud has been treated as a security problem. It lives in the risk department. It reports to the CFO, occasionally the CISO, and shows up in board decks as a compliance line item. The CRO and CMO rarely touch it.

That framing is outdated, and it is costing growth companies far more than they realize. Here is the uncomfortable truth: Fraud is not only a security failure; more importantly, it is a revenue leak. And until B2B and growth-stage companies start treating it that way, they will keep plugging holes in the wrong place while their revenue pipeline quietly bleeds.

The Numbers Are No Longer Abstract

Let's start with the data, because it has become impossible to ignore.

Companies worldwide lost an average of 7.7 percent of annual revenue to fraud over the past year. That’s an estimated $534 billion across surveyed firms, or said another way: It’s a half a trillion, with a T. In the United States, that figure jumps to 9.8 percent of revenue, a staggering 46 percent increase compared to what was reported in 2024.

Read that again. Nearly 10 cents of every dollar earned by a U.S. company is being eroded by fraud. Think of digital fraud as the revenue-facing tip of a multi-trillion cybercrime iceberg, which is why treating fraud as a growth issue (not just a cost center) is so important

Mid-stage B2B growth companies are straining to build repeatable revenue engines and hit their board-mandated targets, and this is not an abstraction. This is margin compression. This is pipeline leakage. This is the silent tax on every dollar your sales team closes.

The ACFE has long estimated that a typical organization loses 5 percent of annual revenue to fraud, largely from internal controls failures and manual processes. Layer on top of that the explosion of external fraud, and the picture sharpens considerably: payment fraud, business email compromise (BEC), account takeover, and the new wave of AI-generated deepfakes are only a fraction of the threat.

The revenue impact is not evenly distributed. A Sift analysis of 2024-2025 industry data breaks down the $534 billion in annual fraud losses across seven categories. Lost legitimate orders account for the largest share, at $157 billion. Bad orders, including returns abuse, refund fraud, and friendly fraud, add another $132 billion. Ops productivity and systems costs contribute $76 billion; chargebacks, $36 billion; opportunity losses, $34 billion; payment losses, $28 billion; and account takeovers, $20 billion. Taken together, 84 percent of worldwide fraud losses hit the revenue line directly. Only 16 percent registers as an operational cost.

In 2024, 90 percent of U.S. companies were targeted by cyber fraud. Nearly 60 percent said the financial impact exceeded $5 million, representing a 136 percent increase from the prior year. Twenty percent reported losses above $25 million. These are not edge cases at large enterprises. These are companies of all sizes, in all sectors.

Fraud is a Cost Multiplier, Not a Line Item

Here is where most executives underestimate the problem: they think of fraud losses as the fraud event itself: the stolen transaction, the reversed payment, the compromised account. That number is painful but finite.

The real cost is a multiplier.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions' True Cost of Fraud Study found that in 2025, every dollar lost to fraud actually costs U.S. merchants $4.61 when factoring in operational overhead, fees, fulfillment costs, and downstream chargeback management. That is a 37 percent increase compared to five years ago.

Chargebacks alone tell the story clearly. Global chargeback volume is expected to grow 24 percent from 2025 to 2028, reaching 324 million transactions annually. Merchants and e-commerce companies in the U.S. and Europe spend, on average, 10 percent of revenue managing payment fraud. And for every $100 in fraudulent orders, the actual cost to the business is $207 when you account for wholesale costs, fees, and logistics. That’s a 2x cost multiplier hiding in plain sight.

One-third of merchants surveyed in the 2024 Chargeback Field Report said that fraud-related costs had directly increased the end price of the goods and services they sell. Fraud, in other words, is now a customer experience and pricing problem, rather than merely a finance issue.

The Revenue Team Is Being Left Out of the Conversation

The people best positioned to detect, quantify, and reduce fraud's impact on a business are the same people who own the revenue engine: CROs, CMOs, and RevOps leaders.

Why? Because fraud shows up in the metrics they already watch.

Conversion rates that seem healthy on the surface may be masking fraudulent orders inflating the top of the funnel. Customer acquisition costs rise when bad actors game your acquisition channels. Churn numbers look alarming when they include account takeovers that drove legitimate customers away. Lifetime value calculations are distorted when a meaningful percentage of “customers” are fraudulent.

Revenue leaders are experts at reading pipeline signals. They know when something is off in the funnel. The problem is they have not been trained to recognize fraud as one of the root causes, because fraud has historically been someone else's department. This needs to change at a foundational level.

The most forward-thinking CROs treat fraud rates as revenue KPIs alongside conversion rates, average contract values, and churn. The logic is straightforward: if fraud is consuming 5 percent to 10 percent of revenue, optimizing it even partially delivers the same bottom-line impact as a 10 percent improvement in close rate, and often with less cost and effort.

AI Has Dramatically Changed & Raised the Stakes

The fraud environment of 2025 is materially different from even two years ago. Fraudsters have adopted AI faster than most enterprises have.

In early 2024, an employee at Arup Engineering's Hong Kong office was deceived by a deepfake video call impersonating senior executives and authorized $25.6 million in transfers across five bank accounts. Ferrari's CEO was impersonated using AI-generated voice cloning. At LastPass, only an employee's sharp instinct about “artificial urgency” stopped a similar scheme.

Generative AI now enables attackers to produce highly convincing phishing emails, voice clones, and synthetic identities at scale. Account takeover fraud grew 141 percent from 2021 to 2025. BEC and impersonation scams are now the top fraud vector against organizations, up 103 percent year-over-year.

First-party fraud (when customers or insiders exploit the system from within) is now the world's most prevalent fraud type, representing 36 percent of all reported fraud in 2024, up from just 15 percent the prior year. Friendly fraud, in which customers dispute legitimate purchases, accounts for 45 percent of all e-commerce fraud globally and forecasts show a 40 percent rise by 2026. The threat is quite clearly systemic.

What Enlightened Revenue Leaders Are Doing About Fraud

The good news: There are clear, practical steps that CROs and CMOs can take today to bring fraud into the revenue conversation.

Make fraud a revenue metric. Add fraud-related revenue leakage to your monthly revenue review alongside pipeline coverage, win rate, and churn. Quantify what fraud is actually costing you, not just in direct losses, but in the full multiplier.

Align risk and revenue operations. The friction between these two functions is where fraud hides. When revenue ops and risk teams share data and dashboards, anomalies surface faster. BEC schemes succeed because finance, sales, and security operate in silos.

Tighten the ICP filter. Precisely defined Ideal Customer Profiles are not just a demand generation discipline. They are a fraud filter. The more precisely you know who is buying from you and why, the more quickly you can identify actors who do not fit the pattern.

Invest in layered detection, not point solutions. Dual-authorization protocols, AI-driven anomaly detection, and real-time data-sharing platforms are no longer enterprise-only tools. They are table stakes for midmarket companies operating at scale.

Train the revenue team to recognize fraud signals. Sales, customer success, and revenue operations are often the first to interact with anomalous accounts. Training them to flag unusual patterns closes the early-detection gap that compliance teams cannot cover alone.

The Reframe That Changes Everything

Every dollar your sales team works to earn can be undermined by fraud that your revenue organization was never asked to watch for. Treating fraud as a security problem and handing it to a compliance team is the equivalent of treating customer churn as an IT problem and handing it to the help desk. Technically defensible. Practically disastrous.

The companies that will build the most resilient revenue engines over the next three to five years will be the ones that bring fraud into the revenue conversation now, before it quietly consumes the pipeline their teams are working so hard to build.

Fraud is a revenue problem, and it’s time for leaders everywhere to start owning it like one.

Johannes Hoech is chief marketing officer at Sift, a leading fraud prevention and digital trust platform serving 700-plus global brands. A Silicon Valley executive with more than 30 years of experience scaling B2B technology companies, Hoech provides leadership to Sift's go-to-market strategy, demand generation, revenue analytics, competitive intelligence, and AI enablement initiatives. Since joining Sift, he has driven GTM funnel diagnostics, Q3 OKR development, and a comprehensive competitive response program. He previously founded Premonio and held CMO, COO, and VP roles at WhiteHat Security, Spirion, and Intuit.