Veteran-owned businesses face fake invoice and impersonator scams

The Federal Trade Commission is warning veteran-owned small businesses about scams that arrive as fake invoices, bogus tech support calls and staff impersonating the government or other businesses. Ahead of National Veterans Small Business Week, the Federal Trade Commission says a trained workforce is the strongest defense a business owner has. Check any invoice or payment demand against your own records before paying it, no matter how official it looks.

What to do

• Read the FTC's article on scams and your small business with the whole team.
• Watch and share the FTC's videos for small businesses with staff.
• Check any invoice or demand against records before paying, rather than acting on the document alone.
• Report suspected scams so patterns can be tracked.

The scams named target the routine paperwork of running a business. A fake invoice looks like a bill for something already ordered, so whoever opens the mail pays it without checking. A tech support call claims a problem with a system that is actually working fine, and asks for remote access or payment to fix it. A business or government impersonator calls or emails claiming to represent an agency or a supplier, using that authority to ask for money or details.

None of these rely on one weak link. They rely on whichever employee is first to see the message, because a small business often has no separate finance team to catch a bad invoice before it is paid. That is the gap the FTC's advice is aimed at closing: not a single owner checking everything, but a whole staff that knows what a scam invoice or a fake tech call looks like.

The FTC and the Florida Veterans Business Outreach Center are hosting a free webinar on Monday, November 9 at 11am ET, called Helping Military Veterans Protect Their Small Business from Scams. It is open to veteran small business owners and their teams. The FTC is also pointing people to its consumer alerts list, to track new scam trends as they appear.

The pattern underneath all three scam types is the same: something arrives that looks like routine business correspondence, and it asks for action before anyone checks it against what the business actually ordered or expects. A single owner cannot be the only line of defense against that, because the scam does not wait for the owner to be the one who opens the mail.

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