Worked example
The fraud email, hitting the gate
Copperline Mechanical — an HVAC contractor paying ~40 vendors
A Thursday afternoon email from a known supplier: "We've switched banks — here are the new details for the invoice due Friday." This is the most expensive email in business. Here is what happens when it hits the gate instead of the AP inbox.
This walkthrough follows a sample business. Where the engine is deterministic (statutory checklists, the filing calendar, the report arithmetic), the artifacts below are its actual output for the sample inputs — your dates and dollars come from your own setup.
1 · The request is logged, and everything freezes
However it arrives, the change goes on the ledger — who asked, how, what changed (last-4 hints only; the guard never stores full account numbers). The vendor record is NOT updated.
Bank-change ledger — new entry
- Payee
- Summit Supply Co.
- Requested via
- Email — "urgent, before Friday's payment"
- Change
- acct …8821 → acct …3307
- Status
- PENDING — frozen until verified
2 · Someone tries to approve it anyway — the system refuses
Under deadline pressure, the unwritten verification step is the one that gets skipped. Here it is not skippable — this is the product's actual refusal message, verbatim.
Approve attempt on an unverified change
“REFUSED: not verified out-of-band yet. Call the number on file — never the one in the request.”
The approve action does not work on an unverified change. That refusal is enforced in code, not in a training deck.
3 · Verification happens the FBI-recommended way
A call to the number already on file — never the contact info inside the request, which is exactly what a fraudster controls. The note records who answered.
Verification recorded
- Method
- Callback to known number on file
- Note
- Called Summit AR line (number from the 2024 contract). Reached T. Alvarez — Summit has NOT changed banks. Fraud attempt.
- Outcome
- REJECTED — logged, AP notified, original details untouched
4 · The attempt becomes a report line
Blocked changes are counted on the monthly report — counted, not priced, because a wire that never left has no invoice line and we refuse to invent one.
Monthly report line
| Count | Item |
|---|---|
| 1 | payment-detail change rejected at the verification gate |
The takeaway
The gate turns "hopefully AP would have caught it" into a step that physically cannot be skipped.
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