Payment diversion frauds can involve huge sums of money and have a devastating lifelong impact on the home buyer and their personal finances. The scams can be highly sophisticated and involve the criminals pretending to be the victims’ lawyer to try and con them into diverting their payments to a bank account controlled by them, usually by intercepting the clients’ emails.

Lawyers and their clients can all play a part in making such crimes more difficult for the criminals by being vigilant.

A reminder to our clients and conveyancing colleagues -

• our firm’s bank account details will not alter during the course of a transaction
• we will not change our bank account details via email
• we never sent our bank details by email (we use post and fax)
• speak to your bank about the best way of transferring large sums of money
• if you get a suspicious email call us