PRESS RELEASE: The invoice can be real. The bank account can be a trap: Australian payment-redirection losses hit $166.8 million

MEDIA RELEASE

For immediate release | 30 September 2026

The invoice can be real. The bank account can be a trap: Australian payment-redirection losses hit $166.8 million

Australian payment-redirection losses rose 9.3 per cent to $166.8 million in 2025. Sceáwian’s new Investigation & Fraud Index shows why the decisive evidence may sit in a supplier record, an approval trail or a compromised inbox.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – A business can receive a genuine invoice, approve a genuine payment and still send the money to a criminal’s account. Reported Australian losses to payment-redirection scams reached $166.8 million in 2025, up from $152.6 million in 2024, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre’s combined data.

The cost can be devastating for one business. In a case published by the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre, a construction company received changed bank details from a supplier’s compromised email account and made two payments. It could not recover more than $150,000.

Sceáwian Intelligence Group’s newly released Australian Investigation & Fraud Index 2026 puts the focus on the moment a legitimate transaction changes direction. Spotting a suspicious email is only the start. An investigation must establish who changed the payment destination, what authority they appeared to have, who approved the transfer and which original records still exist.

“Payment redirection is a business-process crime as much as a cybercrime. The decisive evidence may be in a supplier change log, an approval trail or a mailbox rule.” — Australian Investigation & Fraud Index 2026

The report traces the original and altered invoice, supplier bank-detail history, mailbox activity, approval records and bank-transfer timestamps. Those records can help distinguish a spoofed request, a compromised account and a change made inside the organisation. None should be assumed before the evidence is tested.

Time matters. Resetting an inbox or overwriting a supplier record before preserving it can make the sequence harder to reconstruct. A business that suspects a redirected payment should contact its bank promptly, preserve the original material and verify the supplier through a known, independent contact channel.

The Index’s corporate chapter applies the same approach to suspected internal supplier and procurement fraud. It explains how to test possible insider involvement alongside external compromise and ordinary error, without assuming the cause.

Read or download the free 22-page report:

Notes for editors

The $166.8 million figure and 9.3 per cent increase come from the National Anti-Scam Centre’s Targeting Scams 2025 report, published in March 2026. They are combined reported losses across participating channels, not a business-only total. The construction case is published by ASD’s Australian Cyber Security Centre; its date of occurrence is not stated. Sceáwian’s Index analyses published evidence and does not claim these figures as proprietary research.

National Anti-Scam Centre source:
https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/targeting-scams-report-2025.pdf

ASD construction-business case:
https://www.cyber.gov.au/learn-basics/explore-basics/small-business

About Sceáwian Intelligence Group: Sceáwian is an Australian corporate intelligence and investigations practice working across fraud and procurement, corporate investigations, workplace misconduct, due diligence and digital evidence. The truth has a trail.

Media enquiries and interview requests:
https://sceawian.com.au/contact/