The consumer side of Black Friday gets all the warnings, so the fraud aimed at businesses slips through underneath it. The message that arrives is not a discount. It is an invoice, or a renewal notice, for something you genuinely pay for - a design tool, an antivirus subscription, the domain your website sits on. It looks like admin, and admin gets paid without much thought in a busy week.

The domain one is the most convincing. “Your .co.uk domain expires in 7 days. Renew now to avoid loss of service.” The sender name is close to a real registrar, the amount is small and plausible, and the fear of your website going dark does the rest. What you are actually buying, if anything, is a worthless listing service - or you are simply handing card details to nobody at all.

The reason these land now is that a small business is stretched thin in late November. Orders are up, the person who normally checks invoices is covering the shop floor, and a £29 renewal is exactly the size of thing that gets waved through to keep the queue moving. The amount is chosen to be beneath the threshold where anyone pauses.

The fix is not vigilance, which fades by lunchtime. It is knowing where your real renewals live. If you can name your domain registrar and your software suppliers, and you renew by logging into those accounts directly, an emailed invoice becomes something you check rather than something you pay. Anything you cannot match to a supplier you already use is not a bill - it is a test.