What is Business Email Compromise?
BEC — a scam where fraudsters impersonate a trusted party by email to redirect a real payment.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a targeted fraud where criminals pose as a CEO, vendor, or colleague — via a spoofed or hacked email account — to trick an employee into wiring money or changing payment details to an account the criminal controls.
It's one of the costliest crimes in existence: the FBI's IC3 recorded roughly $2.8 billion in BEC losses in 2024 alone, and about $8.5 billion across 2022–2024. There's no malware needed — it's pure social engineering aimed at your accounts-payable process.
The defense is procedural, not technical: verify any payment or bank-detail change through a second channel (a known phone number, never the one in the email), and treat urgency plus secrecy as the reddest of flags.
Related terms
Definitions from the Business Dog Glossary — educational, occasionally satirical, never financial advice.