The British National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) is alerting house buyers and sellers in the UK to take care, following a large scale scam from foreign crime gangs who stole over £10m ($14.6).
The gangs made money by hacking into the email accounts of real estate buyers, sellers, estate agents and lawyers. By reading the email exchanges they wait until a deal is about to complete, and then send fake emails stating that the relevant bank account details have been changed.
Real estate lawyers in Thailand Chaninat and Leeds have been enabling successful property deals in Thailand since 1997
As the email comes from a trusted source (the account that has been hacked) victims are unaware that they are being scammed. Once the money has been transferred into bank accounts around the world that are impossible to trace, it is too late.
The NFIB say that the number of these incidents is rising.
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