Yet another news story broke last week, in which a couple lost a £45,000 deposit for a house due to someone posing as their solicitor in an email exchange. These sorts of email scams are on the rise, and it is imperative for solicitors to implement a more secure method of sending bank account details to their clients, according to IT consultancy QuoStar.

Robert Rutherford, CEO at QuoStar, says: “Once again, thousands of pounds have been stolen during the purchase of a residential property, offering further proof that UK law firms are under attack by organised crime.

“When purchasing a home, significant sums of money are normally transferred from the buyer to their solicitor, before being passed on to the seller. Almost all law firms continue to rely on email to share the firm’s bank account details for this purpose, but this approach leaves both parties extremely vulnerable to fraudsters.

“The premise of these attacks is quite simple: the hacker emails the client from an apparently reliable email address to request the payment transfer in line with the purchase timeline. The bank details included are in fact fraudulent, however, and thus allow the scammer to access the client’s money.”