There’s a good chance a fraud attempt has already landed in your inbox this year. Maybe it looked like a supplier updating their banking details. Maybe it was an “urgent” note from the boss asking you to push a payment through before end of day. Chances are, nothing about it felt alarming. Which is exactly why it works.
Fraud in Canada isn’t just growing. It’s getting better at blending in. According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, spear phishing, the technique behind most payment redirection scams, cost Canadians more than $68 million in 2025, and that’s only the cases anyone reported. For a small business, it usually takes just one redirected payment to feel the sting.
The good news is, you don’t need a security team to stay ahead of this. Most of these scams run the same handful of plays, and a few simple habits are usually enough to shut them down. Let’s walk through what to watch for, and how to build a little breathing room into the way money leaves your business.
The Scams Showing Up Most Often
The Invoice That Isn’t Quite Right
The Case for a Second Set of Eyes
The Scams Showing Up Most Often
Most payment fraud boils down to one goal: get you to send money to the wrong place, or hand over the keys so someone else can. Here are the versions showing up most often for Canadian businesses.
The Banking “Update”
A supplier you actually work with emails to say their banking info has changed, and asks you to update it before the next payment goes out. The logo’s right, the timing lines up with a real invoice, and the whole thing seems perfectly ordinary. Trouble is, it didn’t come from your supplier at all. Someone’s been watching the email thread and stepped in at just the right moment.
The Urgent Ask From the Top
This one shows up as a message from an owner or manager, usually when they’re travelling or stuck in meetings, asking you to send a payment or a wire right away. It leans on authority and urgency so the normal checks get skipped. Fraudsters know a request that feels important is a request people rush to say yes to.
The Invoice That Isn’t Quite Right
Sometimes the invoice itself is the con. It might be for something you never ordered, a duplicate of a bill you’ve already paid, or a real invoice with the payment details swapped out. Buried in a busy accounts payable pile, it’s easy to wave through.
The Login Grab
Instead of asking for money outright, some attempts go after your credentials. A convincing email points to a fake sign-in page, and once someone’s into an inbox or a banking portal, they can sit tight and pounce when a big payment is already moving.
What ties all of these together is patience and polish. A lot of today’s attempts use AI to write cleaner emails, copy a familiar tone, even mimic a voice on the phone. That old tip about watching for typos? It doesn’t count for much anymore.
How to Protect Your Business
You don’t have to catch every trick. You just have to slow the moment down long enough for the trick to fall apart. A few practical habits do most of the heavy lifting:
- Verify changes through a second channel. If a supplier wants to update their banking details, confirm it by calling a number you already have on file. Not the one in the email. A thirty-second phone call is enough to stop most payment redirection cold.
- Treat urgency as a red flag. Pressure to move fast is the most common tactic going, so let it slow you down instead of speeding you up. A real request will survive a quick check. A fake one usually won’t.
- Keep your books reconciled. When your accounts are reconciled on a regular basis, the odd payment or duplicate invoice sticks out instead of slipping by. Staying current is one of the easiest ways to catch something early, and it’s a big reason messy books are worth sorting out sooner rather than later.
- Lock down your accounts. Strong, unique passwords and multi-factor authentication make it a lot harder for a stolen login to turn into a stolen payment. Bank transaction alerts give you another early heads-up.
- Loop in your team. The people entering and approving payments are your first line of defence. Once everyone knows what a redirection scam looks like, a shady email gets flagged instead of paid.
None of this takes fancy software or a big budget. It’s mostly about adding small pauses at the points where money actually leaves the business.
The Case for a Second Set of Eyes
There’s a reason banks and bigger companies never let the same person approve a payment and send it. It’s called separation of duties, and it’s one of the best defences going against both outside fraud and honest slip-ups.
The idea’s simple. When more than one person touches the money, no single email, invoice, or login can push a payment through on its own. A banking change gets a second look. An invoice nobody recognizes gets a question before it gets paid. It’s a small extra step, and it closes the exact gap most fraud is counting on.
For plenty of small businesses, that’s tough to pull off in-house, mostly because there just aren’t enough hands. One person ends up running the whole finance side, which means there’s no natural second check. That’s where an outside bookkeeper earns their keep, and it’s one of the reasons owners think hard about the trade-offs between outsourcing bookkeeping and keeping it in-house.
A bookkeeper going through your transactions on a regular basis gives you a steady, informed second look at the money coming and going. Reconciled accounts and a familiar eye on what “normal” looks like make an odd payment much easier to spot before it clears.
Staying a Step Ahead
Payment fraud isn’t going anywhere, and it’s only going to get more convincing. But the businesses that get burned usually aren’t the careless ones. More often they’re just busy, and a well-timed request slipped through on a bad day.
A few habits flip that script. Verify before you pay, don’t let anyone rush you, keep the books reconciled, and make sure more than one set of eyes is on the money. Small stuff on its own. Put together, it makes your business a much tougher target.
If a steadier second look at your numbers sounds good, that’s a big part of what we do here at AIS. Reliable, reconciled books aren’t just easier to live with, they’re one of the most dependable forms of protection your business can have. Book a call and let’s talk about what that could look like for you.
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