wtf is this email

Last Tuesday, I got an email from Bikram, my co-founder.

Subject: “Quick sync?” He wanted to discuss an “urgent vendor payment” before EOD.

Looked legit, except Bikram never says “vendor,” he says “supplier.” And he doesn’t email, he walks over to my desk.

I walked over. He had no idea what I was talking about.

If I’d been careless, I would have become a statistic.

I run a document AI company. We help businesses turn messy documents into clean data automatically. If I almost fell for it, what’s happening to finance teams handling hundreds of requests daily?

I polled our team: “Have you received a spoofed email from leadership in the last 6 months?”

34 out of 47 said yes. That’s 72%. Eleven people (23%) admitted they almost acted on it.

One colleague showed me what they’d received:

Email phishing is just the entry point.

And the next step isn’t another email. It’s documents: invoices, statements, contracts that look real, reference real names, and even match real company formats.

A UK fintech caught something their manual review missed. 15 applications, 3 days, perfect bank statements. Traditional verification cleared everyone.

An intelligent system noticed that income patterns were statistically improbable for the business types (the numbers didn’t add up). Transaction sequences followed identical timing across all fifteen.

All 15 were fraud. Prevented losses: over €200,000.

The issue? Most companies are still verifying documents the old way:

Modern document fraud doesn’t fail format checks. The complete financial picture needs to make sense, and most verification systems don’t look at the bigger picture.

The companies that aren’t getting wrecked? They stopped trying to manually verify every document. They started asking completely different questions:

A European fintech firm now processes loan applications in minutes instead of days. Their fraud detection got smarter because they shifted from document-by-document verification to cross-document intelligence.

That’s the same lens we apply at Docsumo every single day.

Documents are the surface.

Patterns are the truth.

I almost fell for a spoofed email from my co-founder, and we build AI for document intelligence. So if it’s happening here, it’s happening everywhere.

Fraud isn’t sneaking in through fancy hacks.
It’s sneaking in through perfect paperwork.

What are you seeing in your organisation? Hit reply. After writing this, I’m genuinely curious what patterns others are catching.

Rushabh

P.S. My team obsesses about turning messy documents into clean, structured data that operations teams can actually trust. If you’re rethinking document workflows, let’s talk.

P.P.S. Know someone dealing with document chaos? Forward this their way.