Have you received emails with this advice? Has the account really changed? How do we know this email has come from the right person not from some fraudster who has hacked into an email account? The answer is that this might be a legitimate email – but it might also be a fraudster and you need to check before making any payments. Most people are now aware of this scam.
Recently we struck a new variation of this. An overseas client was in the process of making an offer on a section in Christchurch. Having made an offer, they then got back an agreement which appeared to be signed by the Vendor and with details of where the deposit should be paid. One of our conveyancing team was instructed to help with the usual procedural work. He spotted some anomalies and started asking questions and most important, he told our clients to hold off paying the deposit. Lucky he did that – as it turns out that the Vendor’s signature had been forged and the account number for the deposit was not the agents’! So a lucky save and in the nick of time.
With cyber crime a reality in so many areas of life, we take our conveyancing work very seriously. Often we are dealing with very large sums of money and sometimes with people and firms we have not dealt with before. So our standard practice, to protect our clients’ money, is to make a phone call to the recipient. We identify the person and then get them to confirm the account details. This avoids the risk of paying it to the fraudster’s account – but we (and you) need to be ever vigilant with our money and the information we get by email – and we need to be aware of new scams such as our client recently faced.
