Fraud Awareness Training

It is a preventive control that depends on people rather than systems. Inside a company, sessions cover red flags such as unusual payment requests, pressure to bypass approval, and colleagues living beyond their means, and they explain how to raise a concern without fear. Customer-facing versions use messages, branch posters or app notices to warn about phishing, fake investment offers and impersonation calls. Public drives, often run by regulators, banks or police, reach people who are not customers at all. Good programmes build sessions around real cases, repeat them briefly, test staff with simulated phishing emails and track whether reports rise and losses fall. Success is judged by behaviour, such as earlier reports and quicker refusals of odd requests, rather than by attendance figures.

A bank sends a short quiz and a simulated phishing email to its 4,000 staff each quarter. After the first round, 18% click the link. The compliance team follows up with a ten-minute briefing built on a recent real scam, and the click rate drops to 6% in the next round. Staff also report two real suspicious emails the same month, which the security team blocks.