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April 13, 2018
There is no doubt moving home can be stressful. So much to think about. The recent rise in stories of homeowners falling victim to fraudsters, often losing lifetime savings, clearly adds an extra level of anxiety to the mix.
Below I share some practical tips, which if followed, should help you to protect your money.
Before we look at these, it is worth pausing to consider how this type of fraud works.
To begin with, a fraudster could highjack your email account and send an email to your conveyancer asking for your hard earned money to be paid into an account in the fraudster’s name. The ‘fake’ email will look very real to a busy conveyancer, and often there is very little difference between the real and the ‘fake’ email. This often happens after the fraudster finds out, through monitoring your emails, that you are expecting some money to be returned to you.
The other common scenario is where the email account of your conveyancer becomes compromised, and an email is sent to you by the fraudster from the conveyancer’s email account or an almost perfect reconstruction of the conveyancer’s form of an email. The ‘fake’ email will instruct you to pay money which you had previously expected to pay, to your conveyancer into an account in the name of the fraudster.
In both cases, once the fraudster has your money the chances are it will be lost forever.
To guard your computer against a ‘highjacking’ of your email account make sure you take these steps:
As for spotting fake emails, look out when receiving an email from your conveyancer for the following signs:
Generally, also follow these steps and should not go too far wrong :
Finally, never rush into transferring funds. Always pause for thought.
With thanks to David Pett – Managing Director of MJP Conveyancing Limited
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