Home buyers are being targeted by online fraudsters who are intercepting emails between buyers, sellers and their solicitors. This allows the fraudsters to send false bank details and thus divert the proceeds of house sales.
In some cases, fraudsters posing as sellers contact the legal firm acting for the real sellers and instruct them to send the sale proceeds to a rogue account. In other cases, buyers receive fraudulent emails purporting to be from their solicitors with instructions to send their payment to a different account.
Nicholas and Fabienne d’Adhemar were recently swindled in this way. The couple and their two young children, Clementine and Luca, had outgrown their two-bedroom flat in Fulham, south-west London, so decided to sell up and buy their first family house.
They sold the flat for £675,000, which gave them £270,000 to put towards their new property.
Mrs d’Adhemar engaged a solicitor to handle the transaction and sent all correspondence through her secure work email address, but used her personal email account for everything else, including contact with the estate agent, Chestertons.
But 10 days after the sale was completed they received a call from their solicitor, who said NatWest had flagged up a problem with their account.
Alarm bells immediately rang. The couple didn’t have a NatWest account, they banked with HSBC.
Eventually it became clear that fraudsters had accessed Mrs d’Adhemar’s personal email account and, posing as her, emailed instructions to the solicitors to send the money to the NatWest account.
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