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To close this out, in fact it wasn't a scam, despite the third letter.

The contact details in the second letter checked out against the Law Society website, so I gave them a ring on their general contact number.

The "out of office reply followed by silence" was simply because someone had forgotten to change their message from "I'm out of the office at present" to "I will be away from the office for the next 2 weeks." They were indeed administering the estate and posted the cheque before they went away.

According to the solicitors, the situation was that prior to the death of Mary Smith's husband 15 years ago, all the family financial affairs had been organized by him.

He was a senior trade union official representing one of the major industries in the area, which explains the large size of the estate. He left everything to his wife, but she was pretty clueless about how to manage the situation, and relied on the advice of a friend who was not a family member.

In the 14 years between her husband's death and her own, things became increasingly disorganized, but the friend who was acting as unpaid advisor was convinced that there was a will which left everything to her, since the couple had no children of their own.

In fact it turned out there was no will at all, which left the friend with nothing, and the estate distributed among the descendants of uncles, aunts, and half-cousins (including myself) who were the nearest surviving relatives that could be found.

The third letter would seem to be an (optimistic!!) attempt by another family member to smooth other the resulting feud with the aggrieved friend, by asking the beneficiaries to "do the decent thing" and give their share of the estate to the person who thought she was going to get what she had spent years "working for," unpaid.

So far as I'm concerned, she can go jump in a lake - I don't "do charity". She had 14 years to persuade Mary Smith to make the will she wanted, and failed - so that's not my problem!

Something tells me this might not be the end of the story - but it is the end so far as the legacy itself is concerned. According to the solicitors, the only way to make a legal challenge to the distribution of funds in the absence of a will is for all the recipients under the "standard rules" to agree to a change - and guess what, some of them won't do that!

UPDATE - 15 Nov 2018

I have just received an unsolicited letter, from the genealogy research company, concerning the third letter - apparently some other recipients of it had contacted them. To summarize it:

• The author of the third letter was a beneficiary in his own right, and has received his own share of the estate.




• He apparently believes that some individual is "entitled" to the entire estate, though there is nothing to support that claim.




• He requested that the lawyers involved in the administration send a letter to that effect to all the other beneficiaries, but the lawyers refused, on the grounds that there was no basis for his opinion on what the settlement should have been.




• He was not personally entitled to demand a full list of the beneficiaries' names and addresses, but he obtained a copy of it from someone (a private individual, not a lawyer!) who was legally entitled to that information.

The final paragraph was "We stress that you are under no obligation whatever to reply to this [i.e. the third] letter. You have received the correct entitlement due by law."

"Go jump in a lake", indeed!

And the cheque has now cleared.

I am skeptical too, but given the money involved, it may be worth a day's adventure to do some research.

Mail, email, phone, web can be faked. Offices can't.

You are right, there are a lot of "un-knowables" here based on your current level of research. That is because a postal letter, even one with a fine brochure, can be faked. A website where they give you the URL can be faked (the legit site can be cloned; they send you to the clone with the contact info altered.) Phone numbers can be set up for free by signing up for a Gmail account and activating Google Voice.

A "brick and mortar" office is much harder to fake. The first litmus test is you visit their office during business hours, and see if the place looks like a cheap throw-up, or if it has a sense of occupancy. If it's a multi-tenant building, ask the guard how long they've been there. If a standalone, take photos of their sign from the street, and fire up Google Maps and compare it to Street View (which is typically several years dated).

You can also phone up other attorneys in allied fields who are nearby, and ask them flat out of they've heard of that attorney. You might even have an interesting conversation with one. You can also contact the legal aid society. But I don't want you to overdepend on armchair research, nothing is a subsitute for visiting their office.

Walking in with a printout of whatever "they" sent you will be very enlightening. They'll either say "yeah, that's us" or "let me take a closer look at that!"

Another thing difficult to fake is a litigation record. While you're walking, swing by the nearest courthouse and search past cases for that attorney or firm, to see if they are actually active. Also search for anything about your family.

The contacts don't surprise me.

The first letter said she died without a will. That will involve a lengthy grinding through the default process for dispositioning her assets. The second letter said that they've found some of the money goes to you - that's the outcome of that lengthy grind, and the timing is believable.

I'm not sure how it is in the UK but in the US we have many laws around how unclaimed assets are handled for these types of situations. My company partners with another firm who makes an effort to locate owners or heirs of assets for a percentage of the assets. Typically they send a relatively non-descriptive letter that the person needs to sign which starts the process. The firm then handles the whole process of claiming/cashing in the assets for the owner/heir for a fee.

https://www.keaneunclaimedproperty.com/estate-research-and-recovery

Our Estate Research & Recovery services can:

Identify decedents and verify the proper heirs and beneficiaries of life insurance policy benefits

Search for rightful heirs of dormant bank accounts, certificates of deposit, safety deposit boxes, and additional banking properties

Locate lost investors and shareholders of public corporations and mutual funds

If you are able to figure out where the assets are held before signing the agreement with the firm you can typically avoid losing a percentage of the assets by going directly through the firm that has the assets.

The other answers give good advice. I would like to add this:

There is a kind of scam where a person is asked to handle money, which is later paid on to a third party or repaid. So far so good, but the twist is that the original receipt is bad (but took ages to finally fail), so in effect the person has paid out of their own pocket, believing the first payment is good, when it wasn't.

If this is a scam, the concern I'd have is that you bank the cheque, then get asked to repay it - perhaps it was paid to you "in error" or something, or they "discover" that half of it belonged to someone else. You repay as they ask, but later the original cheque later fails too. Scam.

It might not be that, but I would mainly protect yourself against that risk. So I would absolutely do what others have said - inform the bank, perhaps the police, check out/contact the law firm - but beyond all, I would not repay the money to the sender or anyone, or pay it on to any other person, or draw on it in any way, until you have it conformed in writing by the bank, that it has 100% cleared and funds have been received from the sender, with no possibility of the receipt being "unwound" at any future time.

In particular, if you do get a request (for any purported reason) to later repay it, forward it, or a claim of any error, that should be a huge red flag. Don't do any such payment/onward payment/repayment/transfer/whatever, without very careful checking with your bank and anyone else, first.

In the UK, a cheque from a UK bank will clear after 6 working days. Once it's cleared, the sender can't get their money back (unless they can show you were part of a fraud). So pay it in to your UK bank account, and wait 2 weeks before you spend any of the money. If it clears, congratulations; if it doesn't then it was a scam.

Source: https://www.chequeandcredit.co.uk/information-hub/cheque-fraud-advice/protecting-bank-customers-cheque-fraud

If this were in the United States, my suggestion would be to go to your state Attorney General's office and ask them to review the following:

1. Is the check a legitimate payout of the estate?


2. Was money taken out of the payout before you received it and was that legitimate?


3. Is the request to give money to the other relatives legitimate?

I do not know the equivalent office in the United Kingdom. You could quite likely find this out by calling the police on a non-emergency line and asking. In the US, it's the prosecutorial staff that would investigate at this level, not the police. It's more of a civil investigation than a criminal one.

Here's what I think happened. This lady died intestate (without a will) but with a large estate, at least a million British Pounds (GBP) (if you can get almost ten thousand as one of a hundred after a lawyer's commission, that suggests at least a million). The vultures descended. This included one or more law firms. The law firms proceeded to investigate possible heirs that they could represent. Once they had you lined up, they received a settlement, part of which they kept.

Probate records are public documents saying who represents who in terms of inheritance claims. So if you agreed to have these lawyers represent you and they did so, that's public information. That would then allow representatives of other heirs (real or fake) to contact you and ask you to give back the money.

Things that I might consider scams:

1. The commission paid to the lawyers may be too high. I would consider this a scam, but the lawyers might be covered legally, as you agreed to their representation.


2. Under no circumstances should you pay the lawyers or genealogy firm out of your share without further investigation. They should have collected the money and disbursed only your share to you.


3. Was the share paid to you smaller than it should have been? What if the estate was fifteen million? Then your share was only about 10% of what it should have been, even after a 35% lawyer's commission. The lawyers made out like bandits, and the other heirs are getting a disproportionate share of the estate because you agreed to a small settlement.


4. Paying the real or fake relatives for taking care of this lady in her later years seems a bit of a scam even if they're real. She was in a nursing home and had plenty of money. Presumably she was paying her way. What were they doing? Is the person who sent that letter actually turning money over to someone else? Or is the letter fraudulent?

Turn it over for investigation. You should not have to pay a lawyer at this point. It's possible that you may want to do so after the official investigation. It's not really necessary if all you want to do is cash the check. The primary purpose of a lawyer would be to argue that you should get more money. But the best time for that would have been before you agreed to let the other lawyers represent you.

It's also possible that there is an even bigger scam. Scammers see an intestate death. They send you a check that will ultimately bounce. They try to get you to send money to them or others. If that's it, then law enforcement should be notified as soon as possible. If the equivalent of a state attorney general starts asking about something, then that kind of scammer will just pack up and move on. They probably won't bother you again because you are dangerous and call law enforcement before they finish scamming you.

The greater worry is that it's all semi-legit. You signed away some of your rights already and the relatives have convinced themselves that they really deserve the entire inheritance. After all, they were nice to that miserable [expletive deleted] and she didn't even reward them with a nice will. Or worse, she did have a will -- that left everything to charity and has now disappeared.

Keep any correspondence from anyone. If someone sues you to recover part or all of the check you received, you may want to show it in court to explain why you didn't immediately pay that person.

I would call law enforcement first, but I don't see any reason why you shouldn't deposit the check. Presumably they will tell you to deposit but not spend the money (in case of fraud). They may want to do a cursory investigation first. If you do what law enforcement tells you, then you can't be accused of participating in a scam.

If there is a scam, the best time to report it is before they have collected the money. I.e. as soon as possible.

I'm in the US, and a similar thing actually happened to me several years ago. In my case, it was "we've tracked you down as one of ~30 first and second cousins of Ms. XXX, who died intestate worth close to a million dollars." Sounded fishy as hell, especially as the initial contact was a phone call, and the guy absolutely sounded like the biggest huckster you can imagine. However, after nearly a year, I got a check for about $30K.

Makes you wonder how/why someone who owns multiple properties and has a large amount of money in the bank doesn't make a will... my estate isn't as large as hers was, but I know who it's going to when I die!

As far as I know, the costs of probating an estate and distributing its assets are payable out of the estate itself. At least, that's true in the United States, to the best of my understanding. In addition, anything that you are entitled to upon someone's death, you are entitled to. You don't have to grease someone's palm to get it. They can't hold it for ransom. They're already being paid by the executor for their services in disbursing the assets of the deceased.

I suspect that if you were to pursue this, they would insist on receiving their "commission" from you up front and, once you paid it, you would never hear from them again.

They might "deposit" funds into your account first and then ask you to send them their cut right away, only for the bank to discover over the next few days that the deposit was phony and debit the amount that had been tentatively credited to your account.

Or you might give them your bank's routing number and account number and then learn shortly afterwards that a substantial withdrawal (up to and including the entire balance) had been withdrawn without your knowledge.

If it's legitimate and your relative died without a will and the government couldn't find any heirs it would go to the government's "Unclaimed Funds" office, where anybody with a legitimate claim could go and get the money without paying a lawyer.

However this is almost certainly not the case. It's almost 100% certain that it's a scam.

What you have is a fake check. You'll deposit it, the "lawyer" will ask for their cut, you'll pay them, and then a few weeks later, the bank will discover that the check was forged and take back all their money. The money you sent the "lawyer", however, will be gone forever.

Another possibility is that the lawyer is asking you to commit fraud and claim that you're the sole heir, while there are actually hundreds of people with a claim to the money and you might not even be one of them.

Unless it's the first option where you contact your government's Unclaimed Funds Office and they send you a check, somehow you're about to get defrauded or commit fraud to benefit the "lawyer".