Construction
A contractor moves the kind of money that would get a larger firm a security team, without a full-time IT department or an enterprise budget, across an office and sites that change every few months. We take the whole thing for one agreed monthly number, so the money goes where it should and the crew is not standing waiting on a file.
What goes wrong
These are the calls we actually get from builders and contractors.
Construction moves large sums on email, which makes it one of the most targeted trades there is. A convincing lookalike invoice, bank details quietly changed, and six figures leave — and the bank almost never gets it back.
Men on site are the most expensive thing you own. When drawings, approvals or a change order cannot reach them, you pay for the morning regardless of what got built during it.
Bids you are still competing on, signed contracts and client details, sitting on the desktop of a machine that just walked off a job.
What it costs
Not our numbers — yours. Take your last progress payment, and what an hour of your crew standing still costs you. Those two figures are the argument.
Money sent to an account the fraudster controls is normally gone the same day and rarely recovered. The supplier you meant to pay still has not been paid, so you owe them in full. Take your last progress payment and double it — that is the exposure, sitting on one email nobody questioned.
Multiply the men on site by what an hour of each costs you loaded, then by the hours they waited on a drawing. You paid all of that for work that did not happen — and the schedule slips behind it, so the follow-on trade turns up to a job that is not ready.
If the bid you are still competing on is on that machine, you may have lost the work and not know it. If signed contracts are on it, you owe the client a call saying their information went missing on your watch — which costs you the relationship, not just the job.
None of this looks like a technical problem from where you are sitting. It is a payment, a morning and a client — and the cost lands on the contractor, not on whoever caused it.
What we do about it
Because it is. Dust, weather, dead zones, and a crew with better things to do.
The email controls that stop a lookalike invoice reaching anybody, plus a written rule for confirming a change to bank details — out loud, on a number you already had, before the money moves.
Set up so a dead zone delays the sync rather than the work, and photos, change orders and sign-offs land against the right job without the office chasing anyone for them.
Encrypted and wipeable, so a laptop off the back of a truck costs you the hardware rather than the bid and a phone call to the client.
What is covered
All of these are included in a managed agreement — you do not buy them separately or wonder which one a problem falls under. What follows is what each means to a contractor.
The one that decides whether a progress payment reaches your supplier or somebody else. Protection on every device and mailbox, and a second factor on the accounts that move money. It is also what your GC and your insurer keep asking you to confirm.
Invoice fraud starts in a mailbox. The domain records that stop somebody sending email that looks like it came from you, a marker on outside senders so a lookalike address shows up, and shared files so bids and contracts live in the company account.
The office machines, the estimating and accounting workstations, and the laptops and tablets in trucks. That last group is the hard part, because it is almost never on your network — so it is managed over the internet, and you get a list of whatever has gone quiet.
Job files, drawings, submittals, photographs and the accounting system, restored on a schedule so the restore is something we have done rather than assumed. Site photos are often the only evidence you have when a claim lands after handover.
The office needs coverage that reaches the back room and the yard. A trailer needs something stood up in a morning, moved when the job moves, and kept separate from the office, because it is shared with whoever is on site.
Not something you buy. Your network, licences and accounts written down, kept current and registered in the company’s name — so the setup does not live in one person’s head, including ours.
What we find
Not guesses. These are the specific faults behind the three stories above, and they are usually all present at once. You can check every one against your own company this afternoon.
Most contractor domains have no enforced policy telling the world what to do with forged mail, so a stranger can send email that appears to come from your address and it arrives normally. That is how a lookalike invoice reaches your client with your name on it, and the first you hear is the client asking why the bank details changed. It is a public setting, and anyone can check it.
Bids, drawings, signed contracts and site photos sit in a personal cloud account somebody set up because it was quick. When that person leaves, the files go with them and nobody else can reach a thing.
Laptops and tablets that live in trucks are almost never on the office network, so whatever updates them gives up and nothing records that it did. The machines carrying your bids around the county are the least maintained ones you own.
Getting started
Nobody stands a crew down so an IT company can rebuild a network. The onboarding is built around that, and you know the plan before anything is touched.
Every machine, licence and account written down — including the tablets out on jobs and the laptop somebody took home two years ago. You get the inventory either way.
Before we change anything, you get a straight answer on how a payment could be redirected today, and what a fraudster would have to do. In writing, with nothing altered yet.
Cutovers and anything that interrupts the office or a site go around the programme — evenings, or a week between phases. You know what will be down and for how long.
Written down and kept current, in your name. If you ever leave us, you leave with the documentation rather than starting again from nothing.
Questions we get
We can make it much harder, and we should be honest about the rest. The technical controls — locking down your domain, marking outside senders, a second factor on the accounts that move money — close most of the ways in.
What stops the last one is a written rule: any change to bank details gets confirmed out loud, on a number you already had, by somebody other than the person who received the request. No exceptions for urgency, because urgency is the trick. We write that rule with you, but it only works because your people follow it.
Yes. They are managed over the internet rather than your office network, so they get patched and checked wherever they are, as long as they connect occasionally.
The honest limit is a machine that never gets online at all. Nobody can manage that one remotely — but it appears on a list of devices that have gone quiet, so it becomes something you deal with rather than discover.
The work carries on. Drawings, forms and photos work offline and sync when the device next has a connection, so a dead zone delays the paperwork, not the crew.
Where a trailer needs a real connection we look at what is available at that address and tell you the cost, including the cases where coverage is poor and we cannot fix physics. Better to hear that before you promise it to a project manager.
Priority depends on what is stopped. A crew or the office unable to work is Critical: thirty minutes to respond, in the agreement rather than on a poster. One person with a slow laptop is not the same thing and is not treated as one.
Responding is not the same as fixing, and we will not pretend otherwise. The full set of response targets is on the support page.
One agreed monthly number, quoted for your company rather than published as a list you would argue with. Head count, live sites and what is out there all move it.
Hardware, licences and subscriptions stay yours and are billed at cost. Larger projects are quoted before they start. See how the plans compare.
They are yours and they always were. Every account, licence and domain is registered in the company’s name rather than ours, and the documentation goes with you.
We would rather you stayed because the service is good than because leaving is painful.
Get started
Tell us your domain. We will check from public records, without touching anything you own, whether a stranger can send email that appears to come from your address — the setting behind most lookalike invoices. You get the answer in writing, and what it would take to close it. No charge, no obligation.
