Protecting our Clients’ money

Too often we hear of cases where large sums of money have been lost as a result of ‘conveyancing theft.’ This involves fraudsters hacking into genuine e-mail accounts and altering bank account details on e-mails, so that the unsuspecting payer then sends money to the fraudsters account. This can happen to Solicitors sending monies to third parties such as other Solicitors and Banks, and also to clients who are sending their Solicitor monies. Sadly by the time the payer or payee realises that something is wrong, the money has long disappeared.
A recent article in the Guardian newspaper highlighted the case of a first time buyer who lost his life savings of £67,000.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jan/14/lost-67000-conveyancing-scam-friday-afternoon-fraud-legal-sector-email-hacker?

Solicitors Practices are increasingly being targeted due to the significant amounts of money that they deal with.
This is why we:

1. advise our clients to phone us to speak to someone they know to check our bank account details before sending us any money
2. will never advise of a change in our bank account details via e-mail
3. phone our clients and third parties before we authorise payments from our bank account to check we have the correct bank account details