Mandate
Scam exploiting authorised payment changes to steal company money
Mandate fraud is where someone tricks an organisation into changing details of a direct debit, standing order or bank transfer by pretending to be an organisation that the organisation makes regular payments to in order to falsely receive the payment that was due to the genuine company.
Usually this is in the form of emails. For example, from a fraudster pretending to work for one of the council’s genuine suppliers and asks the council to change the bank account that it normally pays into. Rather than paying the genuine company the council pays funds into the fraudster’s bank account. Emails can be imitated and made to look genuine, emails have been slightly changed to make it look like they belong to the supplier (such as 1nfo@goods.com where the original is info@goods.com )
The money is extremely hard to recover as it is usually moved between accounts very quickly.
