♫ Go on take the money and run
Go on take the money and run..♫

Lyrics and music by: Steve Miller, recorded by the Steve Miller Band.

A lawyer in BC has reported that the fraudsters have a new tactic in their attempts against lawyers and their trust accounts.

Past fraud attempts have aimed at trying to have a lawyer immediately forward funds to a client resulting from a ‘collection’ against a debtor that is paid by a forged certified financial instrument that is deposited into the lawyer’s trust account. Now the fraudsters have changed tactics.

Rather than try to convince the lawyer that he or she has just collected a large debt and he or she should send over large amounts of money forthwith, the fraudsters are now simply forging cheques that appear to be trust cheques drawn on the lawyer’s trust account. This way they bypass the lawyer and their firm controls entirely.

This is a straight cheque forgery. In one case that I am aware, a bank cashed one of these forged cheques, only to reverse the withdrawal shortly afterwards and restore the funds back into the lawyer’s trust account.

This behooves lawyers to go online and check their trust account activity on a daily basis…just to ensure that someone hasn’t taken the money and run….