You are asked to provide your bank account details, copies of identity documents as verification, and to pay a series of fees, charges or taxes to help release or transfer the money out of the country through your bank.You are provided with fake bank statements, birth certificates and other documents if you question the legitimacy.

The size of the supposed inheritance may be very large, sometimes many millions of dollars.The offer looks convincing and may use official-looking letterhead and logos, but will usually contain spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.They may even ask you to pose as the next of kin to an unclaimed inheritance. You are contacted out of the blue by a scammer posing as a lawyer or banker and offering you a large inheritance from a distant relative or wealthy individual.If you provide this information you may also leave yourself open to identity theft. If you make a payment, you won’t receive the sum of 'inheritance' money promised to you, and you won't get your money back.Īs part of their story to prove your relationship, these scammers often also seek personal information such as identification or birth certificates. You may be introduced to a second or even third scammer – posing as a banker, lawyer or tax agent – to 'help facilitate the legal and financial aspects of the transaction'. In some cases you may be invited overseas to examine documents and the money. They may even send you a large number of seemingly legitimate legal documents to sign, such as power of attorney documents. Scammers will go to great lengths to convince you that a fortune awaits if you follow their instructions.

You will be told that your supposed inheritance is difficult to access due to government regulations, taxes or bank restrictions in the country where the money is held, and that you will need to pay money and provide personal details to claim it. Alternatively, they might say that an unrelated wealthy person has died without a will, and that you can inherit their fortune through some legal trickery because you share the same last name. Sometimes the scammer will say you are legally entitled to claim the inheritance.

The scammer usually poses as a lawyer, banker or other foreign official, and claims that the deceased left no other beneficiaries.

You may be contacted by letter, phone call, text message, email or social networking message. A scammer may contact you out of the blue to tell you that you can claim a large inheritance from a distant relative or wealthy benefactor.

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