Arrest Made in U.S. Bad-Cheque Fraud Scam Against Law Firms

At practicePRO we’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of fraud attempts against lawyers involving bad cheques. Mainly these are done by email (though sometimes its a phone call, letter, or even a visit in person) and no doubt all lawyers reading this will be familiar by now with the scenarios: an attempt to collect on a collaborative family law settlement, a commercial debt owing, or an employee injury settlement. The aim is always the same: to get a lawyer to run a counterfeit cheque through their trust account.

It sometimes seems like a hopeless task to put a stop to these, as the perpetrators are difficult to track and law enforcement’s time and resources are too limited to do much about it. So it was nice to see this article from the Washington Post about the arrest of a Nigerian man in connection with one of these scams.