Ndtyjky

About 12 months ago I received a letter ostensibly from a company carrying out genealogical research for law firms. It said they were dealing with the estate of someone who had left money to my late mother, who died about 20 years ago. They wanted me to authorize them to take action to transfer the bequest to me, taking a percentage of the sum as commission. The did not state the size of the bequest, but noted that it would depend on their success or failure in processing other claims on the same estate.

The letter was accompanied with a professional-looking multi-page brochure, and the company had an extensive professional-looking website.

My thought was that at best this was a mix-up of names, but since the company was not asking for any personal or financial information about me or my late mother that they had not already stated in the letter, except for confirmation of my date and place of birth, I decided to go along with it and authorized them to proceed.

I heard nothing until a few days ago, when a letter arrived ostensibly from a different firm of solicitors, stating they were dealing with the person's estate (she had died without making a will), had used the genealogy research company to trace a more than 100 relatives of the deceased who were beneficiaries of the estate, and enclosing a cheque for my share of the total. Given the large number of claimants, I was a little surprised by the size of the cheque - close to a 5-figure sum.

This firm of solicitors also looks legitimate - they have a website, a high street address in the area where my mother used to live, etc. The cheque is apparently drawn company's named account with major UK bank, not an anonymous money transfer company.

The name and date of death appears genuine - a google search found a report of her death (she was living in a care home, aged over 90) in the obituary column of a local newspaper.

All that seems fine, but there are a few "red flags" lurking in my mind:

• The first letter contained absolutely no information about the deceased person, except her name, which was a very common one (Mary Smith) - probably the sort of name one would choose, if setting up a scam?




• The story has changed from "someone left money to your mother, who is dead, and we want to pass it on to you" in the first letter, to "someone died without making a will, and you are one of their relatives" in the second.




• The name itself did not "ring any bells" regarding friends of relatives of my mother who I knew of.




• My mother had lived in this area for the whole of her life, and never mentioned any relatives she had lost touch with.




• An email to the solicitor named in the second letter produced an immediate out-of-office reply, but no further response. I have not (yet) tried to contact them by other means - e.g. by phone or via their website.

Cash the cheque and celebrate my good luck, or call the police?

UPDATE 10 Nov 2018:

Curiouser and curiouser: Today I received a letter from someone in another part of the UK, headed "Dear Family" and purporting to explain the circumstances surrounding the end of Mary Smith's life.

To add to the mixed messages, it states that two of her relations have been "spent many months working hard" on the administration of the estate - no mention of the two legal firms who (ostensibly) sent the previous letters!

After a couple of pages of family history, the punchline is "we have decided to gift whatever sum we are entitled to, to [yet another private individual, who was involved in caring for her at the end of her life] and we invite you do to the same, by sending a personal cheque to [contact details] ...

Now that's the sort of scam I have heard about before!!

In any instance where your hackles are raised about a possible scam, but you have reason to move forward regardless, approach with caution, and complete whatever due diligence you can, without direct contact from the potential scammers.

ie: if they've given you a phone number in the letter, don't call that number to confirm legitimacy. Instead, Google the name of the firm. First, confirm they are legitimate [if you start googling 'Smith & George Practitioners of Law, LLP', and it autocompletes to 'Smith & George Scam?', that's another red flag]. Check reviews of their work, and check 3rd party websites for linkages to associations. ie: Don't trust a seal of approval on their website that shows they are 'UK Board Certified' or whatever, instead go to the website for the UK Board of Certification, and see if they are listed as a member. In this specific case, in the UK you can use solicitors.lawsociety.org.uk, per the helpful tip of @Qwerky in the comments.

After confirming they are legitimate, contact their main reception number from the website that you searched not the number that was given to you in the letter. Ask to be transferred to the person indicated on your letter, and request that they confirm that they were the ones to send the letter in the first place. Note - you should do this for both entities which are listed in the letters - the geneological research firm + the law firm that later provided the cheque. This would have been a good thing to do before sending a reply in the first place.

This will allow you to confirm - (a) that the firm exists, (b) that the firm is not visibly just a front for something illegal; and (c) that the existing firm sent you the letter. Note that this does not yet confirm legitimacy. There are some shady businesses out there, and you may not be able to tell immediately that the person contacting you is more 'Saul Goodman' than 'Atticus Finch'. So now you need to approach the payment carefully.

For the cheque itself, I would advise you to raise the risk of potential illegitimacy to the bank. You could advise them when cashing the cheque that you have had no prior contact with the law firm that provided the cheque to you, and that you want a confirmation when the true payment has actually cleared - this may be weeks later depending on where the payment is coming from. Given that you would only complete this step after confirming legitimacy of the law firm and the legitimacy of your letter being from that firm, your risk at this point should be low.

Given that the cheque is drawn from a local bank, it may even be worth your time to create an account with that bank for the purposes of cashing this cheque - this could help them more immediately confirm the legitimacy of the cheque.

Finally - make sure you spend none of the money until you've gotten something from the bank confirming that it has fully cleared - you don't want to pay any fees for overdrawn payments after this cheque bounces.

There is still a possibility here that you are in stage 1 of a possible scam. Approach with caution. For a near 5 figure sum, you may want to hire your own lawyer to advise you on your best course of action, though I imagine that might cost you a few hundred pounds, at least.

For the record, while your story contains many of the tell-tale signs of a scam, the following are the pieces of information that would make me cautiously optimistic about investigating further, instead of simply trashing:

• They got the name of your relative correct [although likely there is public info out there linking your name with theirs, that means this is more targetted than mass/automated];


• They waited 12 months before handing you a cheque [scammers will want to move quickly while they have piqued your interest];


• They are being paid by reducing the amount of the cheque they sent you [a legitimate way to be compensated for services], rather than by sending you the full amount and asking for a partial refund [a common method of the 'cheque-clearing scam']; and


• The cheque is ostensibly from a major, local bank [scammers will often purport to be sending funds from offshore accounts with banks you've never heard of].

None of the above is a guarantee of legitimacy, and the red flags you've noted should all be taken seriously, but there is enough here that if it were me, I would move forward incredibly cautiously.

I'm not sure how it is in the UK but in the US we have many laws around how unclaimed assets are handled for these types of situations. My company partners with another firm who makes an effort to locate owners or heirs of assets for a percentage of the assets. Typically they send a relatively non-descriptive letter that the person needs to sign which starts the process. The firm then handles the whole process of claiming/cashing in the assets for the owner/heir for a fee.

https://www.keaneunclaimedproperty.com/estate-research-and-recovery

Our Estate Research & Recovery services can:

Identify decedents and verify the proper heirs and beneficiaries of life insurance policy benefits

Search for rightful heirs of dormant bank accounts, certificates of deposit, safety deposit boxes, and additional banking properties

Locate lost investors and shareholders of public corporations and mutual funds

If you are able to figure out where the assets are held before signing the agreement with the firm you can typically avoid losing a percentage of the assets by going directly through the firm that has the assets.

I am skeptical too, but given the money involved, it may be worth a day's adventure to do some research.

Mail, email, phone, web can be faked. Offices can't.

You are right, there are a lot of "un-knowables" here based on your current level of research. That is because a postal letter, even one with a fine brochure, can be faked. A website where they give you the URL can be faked (the legit site can be cloned; they send you to the clone with the contact info altered.) Phone numbers can be set up for free by signing up for a Gmail account and activating Google Voice.

A "brick and mortar" office is much harder to fake. The first litmus test is you visit their office during business hours, and see if the place looks like a cheap throw-up, or if it has a sense of occupancy. If it's a multi-tenant building, ask the guard how long they've been there. If a standalone, take photos of their sign from the street, and fire up Google Maps and compare it to Street View (which is typically several years dated).

You can also phone up other attorneys in allied fields who are nearby, and ask them flat out of they've heard of that attorney. You might even have an interesting conversation with one. You can also contact the legal aid society. But I don't want you to overdepend on armchair research, nothing is a subsitute for visiting their office.

Walking in with a printout of whatever "they" sent you will be very enlightening. They'll either say "yeah, that's us" or "let me take a closer look at that!"

Another thing difficult to fake is a litigation record. While you're walking, swing by the nearest courthouse and search past cases for that attorney or firm, to see if they are actually active. Also search for anything about your family.

The contacts don't surprise me.

The first letter said she died without a will. That will involve a lengthy grinding through the default process for dispositioning her assets. The second letter said that they've found some of the money goes to you - that's the outcome of that lengthy grind, and the timing is believable.

The other answers give good advice. I would like to add this:

There is a kind of scan where a person is asked to handle money, which is later paid on to a third party or repaid. So far so good, but the twist is that the original receipt is bad (but took ages to finally fail), so in effect the person has paid out of their own pocket, believing the first payment is good, when it wasn't.

If this is a scam, the concern I'd have is that you bank the cheque, then get asked to repay it - perhaps it was paid to you "in error" or something. You repay it, and the original cheque later fails too. Scam.

It might not be that, but I would mainly protect yourself against that risk. So I would absolutely do what others have said - inform the bank, perhaps the police, check out/contact the law firm - but beyond all, I would not repay the money to the sender or anyone, or pay it on to any other person, or draw on it in any way, until you have it conformed in writing by the bank, that it has 100% cleared and funds have been received from the sender, with no possibility of the receipt being "unwound" at any future time.

In particular, if you do get a request (for any purported reason) to later repay it, forward it, or a claim of any error, that should be a huge red flag. Don't do any such payment/onward payment/repayment/transfer/whatever, without very careful checking with your bank and anyone else, first.