Inheritance Scams

Who hasn’t daydreamed about inheriting a multimillion-dollar fortune from some previously unknown distant relative in another country — money that you could spend on a bigger house, a luxury car, a new wardrobe or travel to exotic locales?

Scammers know how alluring that fantasy can be. That’s why they invented the inheritance scam, in which they dangle the prospect of a lavish windfall in front of their targets, asking them to pay a fee to access their inherited wealth. In reality, they’re just trying to steal the potential victims’ money and possibly their sensitive personal data as well. 

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received 2,762 reports of what it calls “foreign money and inheritance scams” in 2022, up from 2,447 the previous year. That’s probably just the tip of the iceberg, since scams are notoriously unreported. The FBI, which lumps inheritance scams with lottery and sweepstakes scams, says it received reports of losses totaling nearly $70 million for the category in 2022.

Inheritance scams have been around for a long time, though criminals are always coming up with new twists.  

One common version is the bank executor scam, which works something like this: You’ll get a letter or email claiming to be from the executor of the estate of a wealthy person, usually in some foreign country, who recently died and has no known heirs. Somehow, the executor has come up with your name and thinks you might be a distant relative of the deceased. But even if you aren’t, the executor is so eager for a payday that he or she will offer to present you as the next of kin, in exchange for a cut of the estate.

All you’ve got to do is provide the executor some personal data, such as your Social Security number, birth date and bank account number, and send some money to cover fees and taxes. Of course, there isn’t any mystery inheritance out there. If you give the scammer money, you’ll never see it again, and if you hand over sensitive personal data, you may become the victim of identity theft.

Inheritance scams can be lucrative for criminals. In one recent case prosecuted by the federal government, a ring of Nigerian scammers operating in Madrid and London targeted older Americans over a five-year period, sending them letters that falsely claimed to be from a representative of a Spanish bank. The targets were informed that they were entitled to receive a multimillion-dollar fortune left behind by a distant relative who had died years before — as long as they paid fees for delivery, taxes and payments to keep government officials from asking too many questions. One of the alleged scammers, who was extradited to the U.S. and eventually pleaded guilty, revealed that he had stolen $6 million from 400 victims, according to the Justice Department.

In an older variation of the scheme, a criminal may befriend an older person and pass himself off as an orphan who is in line to inherit a fortune that’s tied up in the probate process. He’ll ask for a loan so he can pay fees and taxes to claim the nonexistent estate, promising to pay back the victim with the money.