Your supplier says their bank details have changed: what to do first
Stop. Do not pay. Then call the supplier on the phone number you have used before, and ask them out loud if the account changed. Do not reply to the email or chat that carried the new details. If someone has taken over that thread, they will answer you there and say yes.
The message usually arrives by email or chat, in the same thread you have been using. It sounds ordinary. Our accountant changed banks. Please send this order to the new account. Everything else in the mail is right, because the person writing it has been reading your messages for weeks.
So the check is simple. Move to a different channel. Phone, or a voice note on the number you saved months ago. Never use the number in the new message.
Why this trick works on careful people
Because it does not look like fraud. There is no bad grammar and no strange link. Someone has read your mail and knows your order, your price and your due date. They change one thing only: the account number. Many banks pay to the number and barely check the name, so the money lands and moves on.
Think about what the person already knows. They have your invoice number, your product, your deposit amount and the name of your sales contact. That is because they are sitting inside a mailbox, reading. Some of them wait weeks for the right moment.
The moment is always the same. It is the day your deposit is due, or the day before your goods load. You are busy, you are relieved that the invoice arrived, and you pay.
Six checks to run before you send the money
Run all six, in this order, before you send anything. They cost you one phone call and ten minutes. A real supplier will not mind. If the person on the other side gets angry, or says the factory holds your slot only until tonight, that pressure is your answer.
None of this needs a lawyer or a fee. It needs one phone call to a number you already trust.
- Call the number you have used before and ask if the account changed. Do not use any number from the new message.
- Read the sender address letter by letter. One swapped letter is the whole scam.
- Check the account name against your order. It should be the company you agreed to buy from.
- Ask for the change on a signed company letter, and ask why the old account stopped working.
- Send one small test payment first, then wait for the supplier to confirm it by voice.
- Tell the person you always deal with, not only the person who wrote to you.
A real account change against a hijacked one
Look at four things: who raised the change, whose name is on the account, which address it came from, and how they react to a phone call. A real change survives all four. A hijacked thread fails at least one, and usually it fails the phone call.
| What to look at | Probably fine | Stop and call |
|---|---|---|
| Who raised it | You asked for the invoice and the usual account came back | It appeared out of nowhere, right as your deposit fell due |
| Name on the account | The same company as on your order | A person's name, or a company you have never heard of |
| Where it came from | The address you have written to for months | A new address, or the old one with one letter changed |
| Reaction to a phone call | Happy to confirm it out loud | Too busy, cannot talk, says pay today |
| Reason given | A clear reason, on a signed company letter | Vague talk about an audit, a new accountant or a frozen bank |
What to do if you already paid the new account
Move fast, because the first day matters most. Tell your bank at once, in writing, and ask them to recall the payment and hold the receiving account. Banks can often act inside 24 to 48 hours, while the money is still sitting there. Then tell your supplier, because their mailbox is what broke.
Write to your bank, do not only phone. Ask in the message for a recall and a hold on the receiving account. Give the date, the amount, the account number and the reference. Ask for a case number the same day.
Then report it to the police and get the report in writing. If the seller is in Nigeria, you can also complain to the FCCPC about money taken with nothing delivered. Keep every chat, invoice and receipt in one folder. Screenshots of the old account details matter most, because they show what you agreed to.
Nobody can unlock your money for a fee
No agency, court or bank will ask you for a fee to release money that was stolen from you. Anyone who promises to get it back for a payment is the second scam. They find you because you posted about the first one. Block them, and put nothing more in their hands.
The pitches sound official. Court fees. A tax on the mobile money transfer that will release the funds. A fee to lift an asset freeze. Costs for a cyber investigation. None of these are real.
If your money can be stopped, your bank and the police stop it, and that happens in the first hours rather than months later. Nobody needs your card details or a fresh transfer to do that work.
How to make this hard on your next order
Agree the payment account once, at the start, and write it into the order. Then treat any change as a red flag by default. Keep every payment on a channel that gives you a receipt with names, dates and amounts on it. That paper is what your bank and the police will ask for.
Put the account on the order confirmation, and put one line under it: this account will not change, and any change must be confirmed by phone. Send that line to your supplier and keep their reply.
MoneyWave is the payment layer, not a guard. We do not check suppliers, we do not hold your goods, and we do not hold your money for you. What you get from us is a payment that leaves you a clean record of who was paid, how much, and when.
Why the advice you find on this is written for London, not Lagos
Because the pages you find on this are mostly written by law firms and payment companies in London and New York. Their advice is not wrong. It is just not written for you paying a factory in Guangzhou from Lagos or Nairobi. We do not sell sourcing or supplier lists.
What we hold instead is a record of what buyers said in public. Our directory listed 708 sellers on 26 August 2026, and 399 of them sit in China. Of the whole list, 77 reached 4 or 5 on our trust signal, and 373 sat at 2 or below.
Read a low signal gently. It means we could not find much public feedback about that account, not that anything is wrong. Many real traders sell to people who walk into a shop and never collect comments online.
And here is the hard part. Even a page full of happy buyer comments tells you nothing about whether the account number in today's email is real. Feedback checks the seller. Only a phone call checks the account.