The Valimail Q2 2018 Email Fraud Landscape shows that fake email continues to be a serious problem, with an estimated 6.4 billion fake emails sent every day.

That total includes only exact-domain sender spoofing, in which senders put a fake email address in the From: field of their messages. This is one of the most difficult to detect and damaging types of fake emails. For example, the FBI recently reported that business email compromise (BEC) costs have reached $12 billion over the past several years.

Valimail’s study underscores the scope of the fake email problem. Far from being merely a social engineering issue, fake email is a direct result of technical issues with the way email is implemented: It lacks a built-in authentication mechanism, making it all too easy to spoof senders.