SCAM - SCAM - SCAM

Is your solicitor really your solicitor?

Did you know that in the first three months of the year £3.2M was stolen by criminals who hacked into solicitor's e mails and impersonated them - a threefold increase from last year! Half of the cyber crimes come from the fraudsters emailing home buyers and asking for a deposit to be paid into an account. Fraudsters will spend weeks infiltrating e mail systems of solicitors monitoring their exchanges with clients before choosing their moment to strike. This monitoring gives the subsequent e mails an air of authenticity so what can you do to avoid sending your deposit to the fraudsters rather than the solicitor?

• Phone the bank just to make sure that the account is legitimate

• Be suspicious

• Sign up to ProtectMyID which scans your Experien Credit Report and alerts you by e mails or texts of a potential fraudulent transaction

• Examine your credit reports regularly to spot entries that are unusual

• Send a £1 "Pathfinder" payment and see where that lands

• Don't swap personal information on social media - one for the millennials!

If you follow these simple steps then you will not end up having to explain to your in-laws that you have just sent the deposit that they gave you to some dodgy crime syndicate - that is never a conversation that you want to have!