One of our members has offered to share his experience of a member of his family being the subject of a complex high value scam. This case study underlines some of the points made by Chris BJ on Thursday 6th March 2025, in particular
- None of us are immune
- The scammers are highly skilled
- The scammers will patiently collect personal information to ensure success
REAL LIFE CASE STUDY
My Mother’s Apartment Was Sold Without Her Knowledge
In September 2018, I received a copy of an email reply from the rental management agent handling my mother’s Gibraltar apartment rental contract. They were replying to my mother’s query as to why the rent had not been paid that month. Their response was startling… “Mrs xxxx, we don’t understand. You instructed us to sell your apartment! “
I called them immediately to advise that we certainly had not asked them to sell the property, and that this was a scam. The agent realised that they were in trouble, and quickly referred us to our Gibraltar lawyers, who had handled the sale. The latter assured us that all the legal procedure had been completed correctly and sent me copies of all the sale documentation. The documents had clearly been forged, a Kenyan Public Attorney had apparently certified the documents, and her Kenyan passport copy details were correct, except that the photograph showed another old white lady, not my mother. The lawyers accepted the documentation, even though they had a copy of her passport on file, with her real passport photograph! The sale went through, and our tenant who had agreed to purchase the apartment, lost his money, as did the Gibraltar mortgage provider. The loss was around GBP 500,000!
Fortunately, the property had not yet been transferred on the Land Registry and we were able to stop the fraudulent sale.
The mechanism of the scam was as follows:
- My mother’s Gmail address was hacked sometime during January 2018
- The hackers then spent two months scanning all her email without her knowledge – during this period they discovered that she was an elderly lady, living in Kenya, who owned a nice apartment in Gibraltar, that was rented out. They obtained the contact details of the rental management agent from the email traffic. Armed with this information, they decided to mount a scam operation.
- The rental property management received a letter via normal mail dated 12th March 2018, purportedly from my mother, providing a new email address, and requesting them to send her an email to this new address to confirm receipt of the notification
- Two weeks later, the rental management agent received an instruction to put the apartment up for sale, which they proceeded to do.
- Our tenant made an offer which the scammers accepted, even though it was well below the market value.
- The rental management agent put the scammers in touch with our lawyers, who proceeded to handle the transaction.
- At no time did either the rental management agent, or the lawyers, contact my mother by telephone to confirm the instruction to sell, even though both had her contact details on file.
- The scammers instructed the lawyer to pay the proceeds of the sale in two equal tranches, 24 hours apart, to the Bank of Tokyo. This was done, even though the rental management agent, and the lawyers, knew that her bank account was in the Channel Islands. Of course, the money was transferred on to other multiple accounts immediately after receipt by the bank and was unrecoverable.
Having alerted the Royal Gibraltar Police and stopped the sale, we duly fired the rental management agent and the lawyers who had handled the sale and appointed new parties to take the matter forward. With their assistance we were able to recover not only all our expenses in dealing with the fraud, but also all our legal costs, as well as all of the loss of rental income. The tenant who thought that he had purchased the property, agreed to sign a new rental contract at a slightly higher rental rate, and is still renting the property today!
The Gibraltar police advised me that they suspected that the fraud had been mounted in Nigeria, or in Kenya, possibly in a scam compound as described in the presentation given by Chris Betterton-Jones. Here are the notes “The scamming business – It’s bigger and more sophisticated than you realise.”
14th March 2025