Business Email Compromise Field Guide
The BEC Prevention Playbook
How small businesses lose millions to spoofed emails, and the twelve-step protocol that stops it.
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Business Email Compromise is now the most expensive category of financial crime in America. Small businesses reported $2.9 billion in confirmed BEC losses to the FBI in 2023 alone. The actual number is meaningfully higher because most small businesses don’t report.
The average successful BEC incident costs a small business $137,000. The largest individual BEC loss on public record is over $80 million, from a single wire.
Every one of those losses started with an email that looked, on its face, exactly like any other email. Not a phishing link. Not a malware attachment. Just a message from a familiar vendor with slightly different wire instructions, or an urgent request from the CEO to move money before end of business. Every one of them succeeded not because the target was careless, but because the target didn’t have a written protocol for the moment when a wire instruction changes.
That protocol is what this guide is.
What’s inside
A field guide you can implement this weekend.
Why BEC is winning
The largest financial crime category in America. Why existing security tools do nothing about it.
The 7 attack patterns
Vendor impersonation, CEO fraud, payroll diversion, invoice manipulation, real estate closing wire fraud, W-2 phishing, gift card scams.
How to spot a fake email
Technical + behavioral signals. Sender analysis, domain lookalikes, urgency and secrecy tells. 30 seconds per message.
The 12-step prevention protocol
The whole playbook in checklist form. MFA, forwarding rule audit, vendor verification, wire threshold, dual signer, more.
Email security controls
MFA, DMARC/SPF/DKIM, ATP, conditional access. Every control explained in plain language.
Vendor management
The one rule that stops most BEC losses. Written protocol. Onboarding checklist. What real vendors will and won’t push back on.
Wire verification workflows
Threshold decisions, callback protocol, dual authorization, same-day verbal confirmation for large payments.
Employee training program
Five-module curriculum you can run yourself. Cadence, reinforcement, scripts your team should know cold.
Incident response: first 4 hours
The playbook. Minute-by-minute actions. Who to call. What to say. What NOT to do.
Working with your bank + FBI IC3
How wire recovery actually works. The Recovery Asset Team. Realistic recovery expectations.
Cyber insurance
Why most policies don’t cover BEC by default. The endorsement you need. Coverage limits. Underwriting requirements.
Templates + checklists
Ready-to-copy email responses, new vendor onboarding checklist, wire authorization form. All in the appendices.
The ROI is not close.
Cost of this guide: $39.
Cost of implementing everything in it: ~$3,000 to $10,000 per year (mostly cyber insurance).
Cost of a single BEC incident: $150,000 to $500,000 (direct loss + forensics + counsel + regulatory notification + business disruption).
Businesses with basic BEC controls in place experience about one seventieth the loss rate of businesses without them. That’s a two-orders-of-magnitude difference. It’s not a rounding error. It’s the single highest-ROI investment available to a small business.
$39 is cheaper than wiring $200,000 to a stranger. That’s the whole pitch.
Get the guide
$39. Instant download.
30 day money back guarantee. Written by Stewart Martin, CFE. Two decades of financial services experience.