The Invoice from the Right Address

Illustrative forensic story: email compromise

The invoice looked ordinary. It carried the supplier’s logo, matched an expected amount and arrived from the address the accounts team had used for years. The only change was the bank account number.

After the payment went to the wrong account, investigators compared the email with earlier correspondence. It had come from the supplier’s real mailbox. That made a simple spoofed address unlikely, but it did not explain who had sent it.

Mailbox sign-in records, message history and the invoice file’s versions helped build a timeline. The revised payment details appeared shortly before the email was sent. The supplier confirmed that no authorised staff member had requested the change.

The lesson was in the sequence of records. A familiar sender address was one piece of evidence, not proof that the payment instructions were genuine. By tracing when the details changed and checking them against an independent source, the team could identify the point where the paper trail broke.

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