QLD Inheritance questions... Is my mother being scammed?

[AmericanNeedsHelp]

Hi all,

I am an american who needs some help!!

I need help figuring out if my mother is being scammed or if this has any legitimacy to it.... Back story: She has been involved with a man she met on a dating app, and has only talked to him over the phone. He claims he is originally from Brisbane, Australia and moved to the USA when he was around 16. He is currently in Dubai and has been having legal troubles over there, and of course he has asked her to help pay for most of it, and in the middle of all of this my mom/he gets an email from a lawyer in Brisbane saying that this mans great-grandfather left him a very large inheritance ($7million+ USD), but in order to access it they need to file multiple documents which will all cost money, around $12,900 USD. And they refuse to front the money or take it out of the inheritance to pay for the documents.

I am 100% convinced this is all a scam but she is not. I found the law firm and the lawyer who supposedly emailed her, and emailed the correct .au email he had attached to his personal page on his law firms website, but either their server is down or he has blocked us. The physical address from the original email sent to my mom is also different than that law firms address listed on their website. He also had very poor english written in said email and did not sound like a lawyer....

I just want to figure out if this is an actual thing, that you need to pay that much money for documents in Australia to receive an inheritance... Please help!

 

[Rob Legat - SBPL]

Sounds very much like a scam to me, for a variety of the factors in your post. Filing fees for ‘probate’ (possibly what they may be alluding to) doesn’t cost anywhere near that.

I’d suggest there are a couple of things you can do to test the ‘legitimacy’ if you want to be sure:
- Depending on time zones, call the lawyer’s office and sound them out, but check the correct phone details using the Queensland Law Society’s ‘find a solicitor’ function (www.qls.com.au);
- Alternatively, just contact the Queensland Law Society directly, let them know your concerns, and see if they can help verify. There’s a prevalence of identity theft going around at the moment, so they may be quite interested;
- Or, if you feel like testing the water yourself first, ask to see the engagement documents for the lawyer. Use those words: ‘engagement documents’. Look to see if they give you a proper costs agreement phrased to be under the Legal Profession Act, including a Form 1 notice about rights with respect to legal costs. If not, definitely a scammer.