I’m at the 5th Annual Solo and Small Firm Conference in Springfield, put on by the Illinois State Bar Association. The presentations are fabulous, and I’m looking forward to writing about some of them in the coming months for the Illinois Bar Journal. (See what was on the agenda by visiting http://www.isba.org/soloconference/09/ .)
This morning I sat in on a great presentation by Catherine Sanders Reach of the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center, “Collaboration Tools: Paperless Communication With Clients,” in which she touched upon one of the more recent phishing scams that specifically targets lawyers.
I wrote about this scam in the LawPulse feature in the September 2009 issue of the Illinois Bar Journal at http://www.isba.org/ibj/2009/08/386_lawpulse.html#emailscam . Here’s how it works: You’ll get an e-mail with header such as “Request for legal assistance.” The e-mail will purport to come from a company based in China and, in less than perfect English, will say that the company needs your help to “exert pressure on delinquent customers” or other words to the effect of needing debt collection services. It will also probably butter you up, saying something like “after a careful review of your profile as well as your qualification and experience,” which, it will note, it obtained from the Online Legal Directory—which doesn’t exist—“we are of the opinion that you are capable and qualified to provide the legal services as requested.”
Here’s what you should do if you see such an e-mail in your inbox or spam folder: Delete it without hesitation, without bothering to open it, and without giving it a second thought.
This is a variation on other scams, including the better-known Nigerian e-mail scams and some online auction site hoaxes, that tries to get victims to deposit checks in their bank accounts, then withdraw a sum that’s considerably smaller than the amount of the funds deposited and wire them to the scammer, enticed by the offer of getting to keep the balance in exchange for little or no work and lulled into a false sense of security by the bank’s having (only provisionally) cleared the funds for use. A few days, or a week, or two weeks later, the bank notifies its customer, the unfortunate victim, that the check was fraudulent. The victim then has to make good on the amount wired and has no meaningful recourse, since the scammer is over in China or heaven knows where.
As I wrote in my article, the American Bar Journal, the California Bar Journal, and the state bars of Michigan and Tennessee have all reported that embarrassed lawyers in their states have nearly fallen prey to this con job, narrowly averting six-figure losses. You can read those advisories and reports at http://www.michbar.org/advisory/advisory6-3-09.cfm and http://www.tba2.org/tbatoday/2009/TBAtoday06-09-2009.htm , http://www.calbar.ca.gov/state/calbar/calbar_cbj.jsp?sCategoryPath=/Home/Attorney %20Resources/California%20Bar%20Journal/July2008&sCatHtmlPath=cbj/2008-07_TH_01_Internet-Scam.html&sCatHtmlTitle=Top%20Headlines , and http://www.abajournal.com/weekly/ bradley_arant_reportedly_scammed_ out_of_more_than_400k .
The Chinese e-mail scam has also been reported on several blogs. Rich Kuslan, an attorney licensed in New York and Connecticut who blogs at Asiabizblog, for example, has reported several variants on the scheme, at http://www.asiabizblog.com/archives/2009/03/another_attorne_1.htm , http://www.asiabizblog.com/archives/2009/04/another_ attorne_2.htm , http://www.asiabizblog.com/archives/2009/06/law_firm_loses.htm , and http://www.asiabizblog.com/archives/2009/06/a_further_twist.htm .
