$18,787 remains unrecovered of the $868,982.14 that Yavapai County briefly lost after it fell prey to a business email compromise scam earlier this year. It’s a type of common scam in which fraudsters impersonate trusted business partners to steal routine payments.

“The investigation is not ongoing, [and] there were no charges filed,” Yavapai County Board of Supervisors Communications Manager David McAtee wrote about the case that the county first announced on Feb. 2.

The county has a contract with a road paving company which county staffers reportedly believed was requesting a change to the account number the $868,982 payment went to. Scammers had hijacked the vendor’s email and sent a routine-looking payment change request. No county systems were hacked; and the funds were wired to what appeared to be the vendor’s new account.

“It triggered a warning by the bank, so that was immediately frozen, and then [Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office] got involved,” McAtee said in a prior interview.

Following the scam, the county completed an internal review and identified where the payment change should have been caught, McAtee said.

“We do not discuss staffing, disciplinary or procedural changes,” McAtee wrote when sked whether that finding led to any consequences in the Public Works or Finance departments.

McAtee declined to describe how the vendor payment change process works today compared to before the incident

“We do not discuss internal processes in order to maintain security policies,” he wrote.

“[Yavapai] County is confident the current financial security measures would catch a similar attempt today,” McAtee wrote.