How fake-will fraudsters are snatching estates

An alarming rise in fake wills is depriving heirs of their rightful inheritance, adding to the pain of grieving loved ones.

The BBC has found "mounting evidence" that a criminal gang is "carrying out systematic will fraud", stealing "millions of pounds" from the estates of dead people who haven't left a will.

Dodgy documents

In several cases, individuals unknown to the deceased have presented wills naming themselves as the sole beneficiary, with clear signs the documents were forged. The suspicious wills are "strikingly simplistic", said probate experts Fraser and Fraser, often one or two pages long, and lacking the "usual legal phrasing and safeguards".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In the dodgy documents, entire estates are left to one or two individuals, "invariably young Hungarians" with "no prior connection to the deceased", who are "geographically removed" from the deceased's property.

To identify their targets, the criminals use the Bona Vacantia register, which lists unclaimed estates, and quickly produce fraudulent wills with them as the beneficiary. To reduce the chances of scrutiny, they often file the claim just under the inheritance tax threshold, despite the value of the properties being significantly higher.

In one case, two British sisters who stood to inherit the estate of their aunt, who had not left a will, found out that a mysterious Hungarian man had produced a will describing him as their aunt's "dear friend".

There was plenty of evidence that "something was amiss", said the BBC, including that the address given for the man was a block of flats that had not been built until 2021, even though the document was supposedly dated 2016.

The sisters were told they would have to bring a civil action if they wanted to prove that the will was a fake, which they could not afford as it would cost tens of thousands of pounds. The case is currently frozen.

The Ministry of Justice told the BBC that it was "working with law enforcement to ensure criminals feel the full force of the law", but critics said an "over-eagerness" to cut costs created weaknesses in the probate system when it moved online in 2017, a development that reduced human scrutiny.

Closer to home

It's not just strangers: people "close to the deceased", such as family, friends, neighbours and carers, sometimes commit amateur will fraud, said probate experts Anglia Research. Often, "social embarrassment" and a "lack of firm evidence" mean that their deceit goes "undetected and uncorrected".

These forgeries can be "strikingly inept", such as when a bereaved wife forged a will for her deceased husband and claimed she'd found it in an empty Doritos packet. The document was littered with mistakes, including a reference to her husband as "her" instead of "he".

In December, a "money-grabbing con artist" was jailed for six and a half years after she nearly "snatched" a family's entire estate by forging her former headteacher's £4 million will, said The Mirror.

Leigh Voysey took a role at a care agency and became the woman's carer, bought a £15 "fake will kit" and "forged" the necessary documents to attempt to steal the pensioner's "lavish country estate", before she was caught.