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Monday, July 12, 2010

Ind. Law - Watch out for scams aimed at Indiana attorneys [Updated]

After reading my China entry, a fellow Indianapolis attorney has sent me this note:

I could have easily become a victim of an Internet scam.

I received an e-mail from a person claiming to be an American citizen living in Japan. She said she had entered into an out-of-court agreement with her former partner that had been negotiated by their respective lawyers. She claimed her ex-partner lived in Fishers and was refusing to pay the more than $600,000 he had agreed in writing to pay her.

I asked her for a copy of the agreement, which she furnished to me and which showed her signature, her ex-partner's and the respective signatures of their attorneys. I sent her an engagement agreement to sign and requested a retainer payment to pursue the collection matter for her.

She sent back a signed agreement without the retainer fee. She later contacted me and said her ex-partner had agreed to start making payments to me and that I should take my retainer payment out of his payment and then send the rest to her.

A couple of days letter I got a FedEx delivery from Maryland that contained an official check for more than $90,000 issued by a bank in Pittsburgh (the bank on which the fake check was written was Sovereign Bank.). I took it to the National Bank of Indianapolis branch in my building and asked them to check with the bank to see if it was genuine.

The bank told them it was a fake check. I was told to contact the bank and report the fraud, which I did. The fraud department told me it was a scam that had been successfully pulled off against a number of attorneys, who would deposit the check thinking the money was there and then sending money to the client. The scammers were thought to be located in Nigeria.

[Updated at 4:00 PM] Don Lundberg, formerly Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission Executive Secretary, and now Litigation Partner and Deputy General Counsel at Barnes and Thornburg, writes that he warned Indiana lawyers about scams like this in his Res Gestae column back in December of 2008. Here is a copy.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 12, 2010 03:14 PM
Posted to Indiana Law