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Every week, finance teams around the world approve wire transfers that never reach the intended vendor. The money is gone within hours, usually unrecoverable, and in many cases the fraud is not discovered until the real vendor follows up asking why payment is late. By then, the funds have passed through several accounts and are effectively unrecoverable.
This is not a theoretical risk. According to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2022 Internet Crime Report, business email compromise (BEC) — the category that covers invoice payment fraud — resulted in losses exceeding $2.7 billion in a single year. When you divide total losses by the number of reported complaints, the average loss per BEC incident comes to approximately $127,000.
That number is not a worst case. It is the average.
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