Every roofing contractor already knows about one kind of fraud problem: storm chasers. Door-knockers who show up after a hailstorm promising a free roof, disappear with a deposit, or exaggerate damage to inflate a claim. It’s a real enough problem that the National Insurance Crime Bureau reported contractor fraud complaints rose 38% between 2023 and 2025, and the FBI estimates carriers pay out at least $1 billion a year on fraudulent roof claims nationally.
That reputation problem is exactly why a second, less-discussed kind of fraud is worth paying attention to: digital fraud that targets the legitimate claims process, not the storm-chaser scam most homeowner warnings are written about. A roofing business doesn’t have to do anything wrong to get hit by it — and because the whole industry is already under extra scrutiny, getting hit by it costs more here than it would somewhere with less baggage.
The Industry Is Already Under a Microscope
One licensed adjuster put it plainly in a recent industry interview: in high-fraud storm zones, carriers examine everything a little harder — which means even honest contractors spend more time proving obvious damage than they would somewhere with a cleaner reputation. That’s the environment a roofing business already operates in before a single cybersecurity issue enters the picture. A fraudulent payment redirect or a spoofed claim communication doesn’t read to an insurer or a homeowner as “we got hacked.” It reads as one more data point in an industry they’re already primed to scrutinize.
Storm Season Creates the Exact Conditions Fraud Is Built For
Business email compromise tied to construction generated more than $1.2 billion in reported losses in 2023 alone, and residential-sector wire fraud losses have grown from roughly $9 million a decade ago to nearly half a billion dollars a year. Roofing has a structural feature that makes storm season a particularly ripe window for this: a single hailstorm doesn’t generate one claim, it generates dozens or hundreds across a neighborhood in the same few days, all moving through email and text at once, often between people — homeowners, adjusters, sometimes public adjusters, and the roofing company — who don’t know each other well enough to notice when something’s slightly off. That’s precisely the combination fraud is built to exploit: real urgency, real money, and unfamiliar parties all communicating quickly.
What This Actually Looks Like
The pattern is consistent across construction-related BEC cases: a fraudster gets into an email account, or spoofs one convincingly, and inserts themselves into a payment conversation that’s already in progress. A message arrives mid-claim with “updated” payment or bank details, often with language designed to create urgency — “the check needs to go out today,” “there’s been a change on our end.” Because it arrives in the middle of a real conversation, referencing real project details, it doesn’t look like the obviously fake email most training pictures. The insurance payout, or the deposit, goes to the fraudster’s account instead of the roofing company’s — and unwinding a wire transfer after the fact is rarely simple or fast.
What Actually Helps
None of this requires treating every claim conversation with suspicion. It means having email protection that catches a spoofed payment request before it reaches whoever’s handling the claim, a simple policy that payment or banking detail changes get confirmed by phone to a known number rather than a reply to the email that requested it, and training built around exactly this kind of urgency-driven attempt, not the generic phishing examples most awareness programs still use.
For the fuller picture on why trades and contractors are being targeted more deliberately, and what’s actually included in a plan built around this kind of business, see the full Cybersecurity for Contractors & Trades page.