Between April 2024 and March 2025, Action Fraud recorded 143 cases of conveyancing fraud, with total losses of £11.7 million. The average loss per case was £78,393.
Almost every case followed the same pattern: a buyer, seller, or solicitor receives an apparently routine email asking them to send funds to a new bank account. By the time anyone noticed the account was fraudulent, the money was long gone.
These incidents don’t represent transactions in which AML was skipped. Most of the firms involved had done their due diligence at the start of a matter.
But that level of scrutiny had not extended to the rest of the transaction. In this case, the point of payment.
Who, not where
UK conveyancing has spent the last decade placing guards at the front gate. Identity verification—including electronic ID checks—is becoming more widespread, alongside source of funds and wealth analysis.
Things are looking more rigorous.
But the outbound side of things is yet to keep pace. Once funds are due to leave the client account, verification isn’t subject to the same level of scrutiny.
Too much of the process still depends on email chains, phone calls, or manual judgment against the details captured weeks or months earlier at the onboarding stage.
Firms that have already stopped accepting an unverified client at the start of a matter will routinely send large sums to accounts they have not independently confirmed.
A partial answer
There seems to be a partial answer in Confirmation of Payee (CoP), which has already reduced misdirected payments between most personal current accounts.
But coverage is still patchy, especially across smaller banks, and freeholders, developers, lenders, and managing agents are still often not covered by it.
Moreover, name-matching tolerances produce ambiguous results; a partial match will still require human judgment, which is inevitably fraught with uncertainty.
For conveyancers, CoP can help them the moment a payment is set up, but it does not necessarily link that signal to the identity verification that took place at the start of the matter.
Closing the gap
The regulators have already made it clear what the solution is.
The Law Society, SRA, and NCA’s joint payment diversion fraud guidance now places additional weight on verifying payee details independently of insecure email chains.
Meanwhile, the PSA’s APP reimbursement rules have shifted liability onto receiving and sending banks.
The expectation is that payment verification becomes a deliberate, evidenced step, not just a manual check at the end of a file.
Conveyancers need to ensure the identity layer built into onboarding can also stand behind the payments those clients later make and receive.
If so, the file is consistent end-to-end and will pass muster with the regulators. If it can’t, firms will soon find themselves part of the next wave of enforcement statistics.
To avoid that end, get in touch with Kord today.
