Jamie and Jackie Harry, from Coastal Pure Water Centre, said people had hacked into their email and altered an invoice they had received earlier.

Mrs Harry said the invoice was identical to one received earlier except at the bottom it stated that the banking account details for the business had changed.

She said the scam email was exactly the same as the original except for one letter.

The scam email arrived in the inbox just hours after the original email from the business.

Mrs Harry said the business was called and asked if they had changed their bank account details, which they hadn’t.

“It’s an international company so they’ve had their IT people look at it,” she said.

“It was traced back to our emails being hacked into. It was a lot of money too.”

Mrs Harry’s experience comes after scammers struck at least three prominent Warrnambool ​organisations this year, defrauding them of almost $1 million.

Warrnambool police detectives are investigating a string of email scams employing similar tactics, with a $480,000 fraud case involving Catholic private school Emmanuel College.

Mrs Harry said the scam email she received appeared very professional and she was glad they had proper protocols in place.

“People change their bank details all the time, it’s a common thing,” she said.

“If you’re not in the habit of calling and verifying it’s very easy to get scammed. The amount of scams we get a day is horrific.” 

According to the ACCC there were 33,700 scams reported last year, with a reported loss of $22 million.

As part of Scams Awareness Week ACCC Deputy Chair Delia Rickard said some scams were becoming very sophisticated and hard to spot. “Scammers use modern technology like social media to contact and deceive their victims,” she said.