Office of the General Counsel

• Jurisdiction: Georgia,United States
• Citation: Vol. 27 No. 4 Pg. 0040
• Pages: 0040
• Publication year: 2022

Office of the General Counsel No. Vol. 27 No. 4 Pg. 40 Georgia Bar Journal February, 2022

Too Good to Be True?

BY PAULA FREDERICK

It usually starts with an email ...

A Potential Client (PC) needs a lawyer. And of all the lawyers in all the towns in all the world, PC chooses you.

PC needs a place to stash some money" ? a lot of money" ?for a short time. There's a deal in the works, but PC doesn't want your help on the substance of it. He just wants access to your trust account.

PC has investors who are comforted by the fact that their money will be held in a lawyer's escrow account. He's in Hong Kong. The investors? You aren't quite sure where they are, but PC mentions companies in Australia and the U.K.

PC presents you with an executed contract that names his company as buyer of a company that has an address in Australia. The contract names you as paymaster and obligates you to wire the escrowed funds to the seller when the time is right.

In the following weeks, millions of dollars turn up in your escrow account, identified only by 24-digit numbers. You don't know whose money it is, or where it's coming from. When PC gives the word, you wire the money to the account he designates.

The best part? The contract set your payment at 1% of the amount that went through the account, so you just earned a cool $50,000!

Then things start to go wrong. Your first hint is when you get a call from someone you have never heard of. The caller claims he wired $500,000 to your escrow account and he has receipts to prove it. He's looking for PC, who has disappeared. When you contact the seller you find they have not been paid, and they are looking for PC too. Within a few days you are getting questions from the bank, the Bar and the FBI.

It's hard to believe that a lawyer could fall prey to a scam like this, yet this scenario plays out several times each year. So what's a lawyer to do?

Watch for red flags! Why would PC hire you, a lawyer in small-town...