Phishing is a type of online scam where hackers try to trick a person to provide personal information, like passwords, bank details, etc but it could also lead to misleading lawyers and trick them to make a bank transfer to the fraudsters´ bank account.

I was in a property purchase completion this week at the notary´s in Marbella and I was able to experience the above. My role was to represent one of the sellers while the other seller was represented by another lawyer. As you may know, the sale price is usually paid by either a guaranteed banker´s draft (cheque bancario) or a bank transfer. My client preferred a banker´s draft, which to be honest is usually my preferred option, but the other seller asked for a bank transfer. A couple of days before completion the said seller wrote an email to his lawyer and provided him with new bank details. This would normally raise the alert of a lawyer but the said lawyer was dealing with two urgent transactions at that time and could not pay the necessary attention and time to analyze the change of details properly. Fortunately, the buyer´s lawyer checked the new bank details provided and saw that they belonged to a bank account in France, something a little bit strange as the seller was British and had no connection with France. The buyer´s lawyer raised this issue to us a couple of hours before completion and the other seller´s lawyer, who then checked with her client, realized that her client never gave her those new bank details. His client´s email had been hacked and a fraudster was planning to trick the lawyer to transfer the share of the sale proceeds to a different bank account, clearly owned or connected to the hacker. The payment method was then changed to a banker´s draft and completion could take place without any further problems.

This made me think. We often take for granted that a bank certificate pdf document provided by a client who is selling a Spanish property is sufficient as it shows the name of the account holder and the bank account details but the truth is that this should be followed with a phone call to the client to reconfirm those details. I have noticed that this precaution is regularly taken by my English colleagues who deal with English property transactions but I must say that this is not the case with my Spanish colleagues. A big lesson learnt and although I am more in favour of receiving the sale proceeds with a banker´s draft, some clients will still prefer a bank transfer. From now on, those client will definitely be getting a phone call from me to check their bank details! As we say in Spain “más vale prevenir que curar” which comes to mean something similar to “better be safe than sorry”.