AwarenessScams & deception
Business email compromise (BEC)
A criminal poses as your boss or a supplier to have money sent to them.
Understand it
Business email compromise is impersonation of a trusted person - often the owner or the finance lead - to prompt an urgent payment or a change of bank details. It is the single most expensive scam facing UK businesses.
How to spot it
An out-of-the-blue payment request, a supplier’s “new” bank account, or pressure to move fast and keep it quiet.
Close the gap
- Make it a rule that every payment or bank-detail change is confirmed by phone.
- Require two people to approve payments over a set amount.
- Protect your most-impersonated inboxes with two-step sign-in.
- Set up SPF and DMARC so your address cannot be forged - see the Toolkit.
What to do about it
You don't fix a scam, you spot one. Run anything suspicious through our phishing checker, and let your plan harden the accounts and money they're really after. When money's involved, the fix is a habit, not a setting: confirm every payment or change of bank details by phone, on a number you already have.