A $500,000 Loss, a Partnership Worth Saving

A construction company was owed $500,000 by a vendor. The payment never arrived the way it was supposed to. It had been intercepted and wired overseas, and by the time the loss surfaced, the money was in a country that made straightforward recovery unlikely. Worse, the two companies did more than a million dollars of business together, and the loss threatened to end the relationship entirely.

Proof before positioning

The instinct in a case like this is to lawyer up and assign blame. We took a different first step. We built the forensic record of what actually happened to the payment, documenting the interception and the fraud in a way that left little room for argument. Facts change a negotiation. Accusations without them just harden both sides.

A recovery that kept the relationship

Rather than push the client straight into litigation, we advised presenting the forensic findings to the vendor directly. The evidence did the persuading. The vendor agreed to pay half of the original $500,000 invoice, and the client recovered $250,000 it had every reason to believe was gone. Just as important, the working relationship survived, and the two companies came out of it with better controls against the next attempt.

The point of the evidence

Not every wire fraud case ends in a courtroom, and not every recovery has to. Sometimes the strongest outcome is a documented set of facts that lets two businesses resolve a loss and keep working together. That is one of the ways our business email compromise and wire fraud practice protects clients, alongside full-recovery pursuits.

If a payment has gone missing between you and a partner, talk to our team before the relationship goes with it.

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