Invoice fraud cost UK businesses £92.7m last year

Most UK businesses have no procedures in place to defend against invoice fraud despite it costing over £93m to UK businesses last year, according to a new report by UK Finance.

UK Finance's new Fraud The Facts 2019 report has been released, providing an overview of payment fraud across UK business. The report analysed data from 250 firms across the banking and finance sector, and has produced some pretty interesting statistics. Banks and payment firms prevented £1.66 billion in unauthorised payment fraud in 2018, but £844.8m of fraud was successful.

For UK businesses, the stand-out figure is the increase in Invoice and Mandate scams, which have become increasingly common throughout 2018 and accounted for 35% of all Authorised Push Payment scams. A total of £123.7 was stolen in this form of scam, with £92.7m of it coming from non-personal business bank accounts. The average payment scammed from businesses was £20,750 per incident.

Invoice scams typically target businesses as they make larger payments to suppliers and B2B customers, and they usually take the form of a criminal contacting the company and convincing them to change the invoice details to make the payment to a different bank account. Criminals will often pose as a representative for an existing supplier or contractor that the business legitimately uses, information that they may have previously gathered by breaching the company's computer systems or email accounts.

Most businesses have not taken steps to keep themselves safe from invoice fraud, according to the report by UK Finance. Check out the full report for detailed information on several types of pervasive scam that businesses can fall victim to and advice on how to defend your company against them.

Source: UK Finance Report, UK Tech News