‘Friday afternoon fraud’: warning for UK homebuyers on bank scams

Victims have lost tens of thousands – and in one case £300,000 – due to fake emails from solicitor or estate agent

Y ou are poised to move house and are awaiting the solicitor’s instructions that things are ready to go and it is time to hand over your deposit. When the email arrives giving you their bank details, you set up the transfer and move the cash. And then the solicitor calls to ask where the money is.

Conveyancing fraud involves criminals getting access to an email chain between homebuyers and their solicitors or estate agents and requesting payment to a bank account they control. Sometimes the solicitor has been hacked, but often the homebuyer has been the victim of a phishing exercise.

The scam is sometimes known as “Friday afternoon fraud” as it tends to take place at the end of a sale, which is often timed before a weekend.

The sums of money involved in a property sale mean the fraudster only have to land a few victims to make a lot of cash.

Report Fraud (formerly known as Action Fraud) says there were 3,657 scams involving persuading people to pay into the wrong bank account in the 2025-26 financial year, and these cost victims a total of £101m.

Conveyancing fraud is a subset of this. Between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025 Report Fraud recorded 140 property cases with an average loss of £78,393. In the worst case the Guardian has covered, a homebuyer transferred the entire £300,000 purchase price to the wrong account.

City of London police has warned that this type of fraud isn’t limited to purchases – it’s also been reported by renters who have lost money they thought they’d paid to their letting agent, and in probate transactions.

The message looks just like an email from your solicitor or estate agent. It asks for you to make a payment you are expecting to make but may come earlier than you were expecting.

It may say that the solicitors’ firm has new bank details and the payment needs to be made quickly.

If your solicitor’s email has been hacked the message could come from its genuine address, but usually the fraudsters will be using a spoofed email address so if you look carefully you may spot something slightly different from the genuine company’s one. There may be a missing letter or extra punctuation mark, for example.

Don’t post about your impending move on social media as fraudsters could spot this and realise that you are a good person to target.

Make sure your side of the email chain is secure by setting a strong password for your account and using any extra protection that’s offered, such as two-factor authentication.

Avoid logging into public wifi and using it to check your emails as this gives fraudsters a potential access point.