An email from my builder — and £4,000 vanished
MONEY Mail has been warning about the rise of bank transfer scams for years. In January, we reported on the case of Richard Barber, a former editor of OK! magazine, who lost £4,000 to bank transfer fraud.
Richard (pictured), 69, received an email from his Polish builder, Wojtek, which looked no different to his usual messages.
It asked for a deposit of £4,000 for a loft conversion that Richard was having done.
The journalist met Wojtek five days later and the builder said he hadn’t sent the email or received the money.
Wojtek investigated and found out his email account had been hacked. He warned all his clients someone was impersonating him in order to steal their money.
Richard, from Whitsable, Kent, asked his bank, Coutts, for help, but was told just £4.33 of his cash remained in the fraudster’s account. Barclays, the bank that received the funds, said his £4,000 had been withdrawn within four hours of the payment being made and there was no way of getting the money back.
Richard says a compensation fund is long overdue. ‘I don’t suppose I would get back my full £4,000...but anything more than the £4.33 I was offered would be very helpful,’ he says.
Thousands of people have fallen victim to such scams. Conveyancing solicitors, in particular, have been targeted because crooks know they receive large sums of money by bank transfer from homebuyers.
In February, Money Mail reported that fraudsters were even trying to hack into the accounts of people moving home.
Christine and Roger Wilkinson, from Maidenhead, Berkshire, were left £59,000 out of pocket when the proceeds of their house sale were sent to a fraudster’s account. Crooks had hacked the couple’s email account to trick their solicitor and they only got back 82 pc of the £309,000 sale price.
In a separate investigation, we revealed that holidaymakers were left thousands of pounds out of pocket. Dozens of fraud victims wrote in to say they had been sold ‘bargain’ holidays in the Canary and Balearic Islands that didn’t exist.