Your supplier asked to change bank details. Now what?

Why this exact email is the dangerous one

"Please note our new bank details" works because everything else is real: the supplier, the order, the invoice layout, sometimes the genuine email thread, quietly taken over or convincingly spoofed. Only the account number changed. No company register, VAT check, or sanctions list can catch it, because the company is genuine. Process catches it. That is the whole game.

The checklist

1. Stop the payment. Nothing about a bank-detail change is urgent enough to skip verification. Pressure to pay quickly is itself a flag.
2. Call the supplier on a number you already had, or one from their website or the official company register. Never the number in the email or on the new invoice. Speak to a person you know, and have them read the new account details to you.
3. Inspect the email address character by character. Swapped letters, an extra hyphen, .co instead of .com. Check whether the reply-to address differs from the visible sender. If the message was forwarded to you internally, go back to the original.
4. Compare the IBAN country with the company's country. The first two letters of an IBAN are the country code. A German GmbH asking for payment to an account in a third country is not automatically fraud, but it is precisely what invoice redirection usually looks like, and it deserves a spoken explanation, not an emailed one.
5. Use your bank's payee name check. UK banks run Confirmation of Payee; euro-area banks now run Verification of Payee on SEPA transfers. "No match" or a different name than expected means stop.
6. Re-run the basic company checks while you are at it. Status, invoice details versus the register: our guides cover the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.
7. Log the verification. Who confirmed, on which number, when. If more than one person at your company pays invoices, make callback-before-change a standing rule. The rule, applied every time, is the entire defense.

If you already paid

• Call your bank immediately and request a recall of the transfer. Speed matters more than anything else; recovery odds fall by the hour.
• Tell the real supplier through a verified channel. Their mailbox may be compromised, and other customers may be receiving the same email.
• Report it: Action Fraud in the UK, your national police or cybercrime unit in the EU. Keep the emails, including headers; they help investigators.

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