Is This Completion Email From My Solicitor Real? A UK Check

A UK property completion is, from a fraudster’s point of view, an almost perfect target. The transaction involves a large six-figure sum moving on a fixed date, between parties who have rarely worked together before, mostly by email, often under time pressure on a Friday afternoon. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has been warning about “Friday afternoon fraud” against conveyancing firms since 2016, and reportedly still receives around four reports a month of law firms or their clients being tricked into sending completion funds to a fraudster’s bank account.

The mechanic is straightforward. A criminal compromises one side of the email chain — usually the conveyancing firm’s, sometimes the client’s — and reads the thread quietly for days or weeks. They learn the names, the property address, the completion date, the language each side uses. Then, in the final 24 hours before completion, they send a message that fits the existing thread perfectly and asks the buyer to update the destination account “due to a banking issue” or to confirm an “updated client account”. The buyer transfers their deposit or completion funds to the fraudster’s account, and by the time the real solicitor calls to ask where the money is, it has been moved out of the UK banking system and is essentially unrecoverable.

The same family of attack also runs in the opposite direction — a fraudster impersonates the client to the solicitor, requesting that completion funds be released to a different account, or asks the conveyancer to make a “final ID re-verification” using documents that the fraudster then harvests. Both directions exploit the fact that property completion is genuinely chaotic on the day and people are inclined to react quickly to anything that looks like a problem.

Real fraud emails in this category share a recognisable pattern. If a message hits two or more of these signals, treat it as a fake until you have verified it through a channel that is not email:

1. Change of bank account details late in the process. Legitimate UK firms’ client account details do not change between the engagement letter and completion. If you receive an email asking you to send funds to a new account, treat it as a scam until proven otherwise.
2. Urgency framed around completion. “Completion is at 3pm, we need the funds before then or we’ll miss the slot.” The pressure is the point — it stops you ringing the solicitor to check.
3. Reply-to address subtly wrong. Hover the sender’s name on your phone or look at the raw address on desktop. The domain may be one letter off, use a hyphen, or be a free-email service that looks superficially like the firm. jamie.smith@firm-name.co.uk is not the same as jamie.smith@firmname.co.uk.
4. Spreadsheet, PDF, or DocuSign attachment with “updated” banking details. An attached document with the new account number is the giveaway. Fraudsters use attachments because they sit outside the email body and can’t be searched against earlier messages in the thread.
5. No call before the email. Property solicitors almost always confirm major changes by phone. A bank-detail change that arrives only by email, without a follow-up call or a prior heads-up, is the signature of a hijacked thread.
6. Request to bypass the client portal. Most modern conveyancing firms use a client portal (HoowLa, Lender Exchange, InfoTrack, or in-house equivalents). An email saying “the portal is down, please send via email instead” should be verified by phone with the firm’s main number from their official website.

Before you transfer money or send sensitive documents in response to a completion email, run two checks. They take about five minutes between them and they are the only thing standing between you and a six-figure loss:

1. Ring the firm using the number on their own website. Don’t use the phone number in the suspicious email signature — that’s controlled by the fraudster. Look up the firm’s main switchboard yourself, ask for the conveyancer by name, and confirm the bank account details verbally. Refuse to read the new details to them; ask them to read theirs to you instead. This way a compromised firm-side mailbox still can’t feed you the wrong number.
2. Check the firm on the SRA register. The Solicitors Regulation Authority maintains a public Find a Solicitor service, and a separate Check a Solicitor’s Record tool. Both confirm the firm is regulated, the individual solicitor is authorised, and the firm’s registered address. Bogus solicitor impersonations — where a fraudster invents a firm wholesale — fail this check immediately.

If the email is from someone claiming to be your conveyancer asking you to verify documents (passport, bank statements, proof of funds), do the same two checks before sending anything. If the request is legitimate, the conveyancer will be perfectly happy to confirm by phone — their professional indemnity insurance depends on them not getting this wrong.

Knowing what a real conveyancer’s process looks like makes the impersonations easier to spot. UK property conveyancing follows a fairly predictable timeline:

• Client engagement letter at the start. This includes the firm’s client-account details in writing. Save it. The account numbers should not change later.
• ID and source-of-funds verification early in the matter. Done once, at the beginning, not re-requested at completion. Re-verifications mid-transaction are unusual and worth questioning.
• Searches, enquiries, contract review — weeks of back-and-forth via the client portal or named email. Nothing here normally involves you sending money beyond search fees.
• Exchange of contracts — the deposit (typically 10% of the purchase price) moves to the seller’s solicitor. Your conveyancer will tell you the amount and the destination account well in advance.
• Completion day — final balance to the same account, on a date and time agreed weeks earlier. Any “last-minute change” in this final step is the highest-risk moment.

For documents you need to send back to your conveyancer — signed transfer deeds, mortgage paperwork, proof of identity — ask whether they have a secure client portal first. Most firms do. If they don’t, an encrypted one-time upload link (such as FileSeal’s) is a better choice than email; the firm’s compliance team will usually be glad of the cleaner audit trail.

Completion fraud is one of the harder fraud categories to recover from because the sums are large and the funds move fast. The first hour after you realise you’ve sent money to the wrong account is the only window where recovery has a meaningful chance.

What to do, in order:

1. Within the hour. Ring your bank’s fraud line immediately and ask them to attempt a recall under the Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud reimbursement scheme. The faster you call, the higher the chance that the receiving bank can freeze the funds before they move on. Also call your conveyancer’s main switchboard (not via the suspect email) to tell them what happened — they need to know whether their own systems have been compromised.
2. Within 24 hours. Report the fraud to Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040 with the email chain, account details you sent to, and your conveyancer’s details. Action Fraud will issue a crime reference number you’ll need for any insurance claim or future dispute. Notify the Solicitors Regulation Authority if you have any reason to believe your conveyancer’s email was compromised.
3. Within the week. Speak to your home/contents insurer and any conveyancing-specific policy (Conveyancing Protection Insurance, if you bought it) about a claim. Lenders and conveyancers also carry indemnity insurance — your conveyancer is required to report a fraud incident to their insurer, which may produce a route to recovery even when your bank can’t recall the funds. Lodge a complaint with the firm via their official complaints process; this preserves your right to escalate to the Legal Ombudsman later.
4. Ongoing. Keep every email, every bank statement, every receipt. Authorised Push Payment fraud reimbursement under the PSR mandatory reimbursement rules has time-bound steps and an appeals process. If your bank declines reimbursement, the Financial Ombudsman is the next escalation. Resolution timeframes can be months rather than weeks; preserving the documentation now is what makes recovery possible later.