The police opened the investigation on April 17 after the company in question received an email which appeared to be from one of its business partners, asking the company to pay future invoices to a different bank account.

In reality, this was a fake account created by fraudsters, and a company representative made two transfers to it, totaling above €1.6 million, according to preliminary estimates, before the scam was spotted.

A fraudulent invoice like the one in this case usually differs from the real deal only in the altered bank account details, with other aspects such as email addresses and context often accurate, making it hard to spot.

Even querying the invoice can be met with convincing-sounding responses, Pärnu Postimees reported, citing information from the state Information Systems Authority (RIA): In order to conduct the scam, fraudsters will usually have first hacked into the target firm's email system, or that of the partner firm, or both, often via a preliminary "phishing email," hence them having enough detail to make the fraud look plausible.

2025 saw a surge in fraud in Estonia, in part helped by advances in tech which mean some tell-tale signs such as poor Estonian language use are now absent, RIA says. The total losses of €29 million to fraud last year represent a three-fold rise on the preceding year, RIA says.

More information on how to detect and avoid online and phone scams is available from RIA here.

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