Glossary

Fraud methods

What is authorized push payment fraud?

Authorized push payment fraud is any scam in which the victim is deceived into personally instructing a payment to an account controlled by a criminal, meaning the transfer is technically authorized and therefore rarely reversible.

Also called APP fraud · authorized fraud · scam payment

The term originated in United Kingdom payments policy and has become the clearest way to describe the category that business email compromise, invoice redirection, and many consumer scams all belong to. What unites them is consent: the account holder pushed the money.

Because authorization is genuine, liability frameworks written for unauthorized transactions do not apply cleanly. In the United States, Regulation E protections for consumers cover unauthorized electronic fund transfers, and commercial funds transfers fall largely under UCC Article 4A, which allocates loss according to whether commercially reasonable security procedures were agreed and followed.

Common questions

Usually not for business payments. Commercial funds transfers are governed largely by UCC Article 4A, which turns on the agreed security procedure rather than on the fact that a scam occurred.

Card networks carry built in dispute rights and issuer liability, while push payments settle to the beneficiary account with no equivalent chargeback path.

Sources and further reading

Citing this entry? Cite as Coffr, LLC and link to https://getcoffr.com/glossary/authorized-push-payment-fraud.

Read the longer research behind this in Blog, or browse the full glossary.

Disclosures

  1. Coffr, LLC carries insurance for its own benefit. That insurance does not cover you, your payments or your funds, and Coffr does not guarantee any payment. Coffr does not hold or transmit customer funds. See the Terms of Service.
  2. "Verified" means the identity, business and bank account checks shown passed on the date shown. A verification confirms who you're paying at that time. It doesn't guarantee that a payment will reach the intended recipient.
  3. Coffr records a cryptographic fingerprint of each verification on a public ledger run by independent organizations. Fingerprints contain no names, bank account numbers or tax IDs, and they can't be changed or deleted.
  4. Sources: ACH volume, Nacha 2025 ACH Network volume; online crime losses, FBI IC3 2025 Internet Crime Report.