Does commercial crime insurance cover wire fraud from a spoofed email in Georgia?

Wire fraud triggered by a spoofed email is typically covered through funds-transfer fraud coverage or a social engineering endorsement added to a commercial crime policy, not the base policy alone. Social engineering, in this context, means a scam where an employee is tricked into voluntarily sending money or information based on a fraudulent request that looks legitimate, such as an email that appears to come from a vendor or company executive.

A standard commercial crime policy is built around theft: money physically stolen, checks forged, computer systems hacked to move funds without authorization. A spoofed-email scam does not fit that pattern cleanly, because the employee who sent the wire acted voluntarily, following instructions that looked real. Many base crime policies treat a voluntary transfer like this as excluded, since no unauthorized computer access or physical theft occurred. That gap is what a social engineering endorsement, or standalone funds-transfer fraud coverage, is written to close.

Example: an Atlanta property management company's accounts payable clerk receives an email that appears to come from the company's roofing contractor, requesting that an upcoming $18,000 invoice be paid to a new bank account. The email address is one character off from the real contractor's domain. The clerk wires the funds. No computer was hacked and no check was forged; the clerk transferred real money following what looked like a legitimate request. A base crime policy without a social engineering endorsement may deny this claim as a voluntary transfer. A policy with the endorsement, subject to its own sublimit and verification-procedure conditions, can respond.

Endorsement terms vary by carrier, and many require the business to follow a callback verification step, such as confirming a payment-detail change by phone using a known number, before the endorsement will pay a claim. Commercial crime insurance and Georgia commercial crime insurance both cover what a standard policy includes versus what requires an endorsement. Cyber-enabled fraud can also overlap with cyber liability insurance, which addresses a different piece of the exposure, such as a network breach that precedes the scam.

Georgia does not require any business to carry commercial crime coverage or a social engineering endorsement (see does Georgia require commercial crime insurance), and pricing depends on the endorsement and limits selected, covered in what commercial crime insurance costs for a Georgia business. A coverage review can confirm whether an existing policy includes this endorsement before a loss happens.