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Conveyancing is a significant cyber-enabled fraud and operational-resilience risk in UK property transactions. Criminals can divert deposits and purchase funds by impersonating a solicitor or manipulating email; attacks on a law firm or its IT supplier can also delay completions. The risks are serious, but available figures do not show that conveyancing is the single largest cyber threat to the entire UK real-estate sector.
How cybercrime can affect a property transaction
A property sale or purchase relies on many parties exchanging identity documents, instructions and large payments over weeks or months. That creates opportunities to exploit trust in routine communications as well as vulnerabilities in firms’ systems.
Payment diversion and email impersonation
In payment diversion fraud, a criminal tries to persuade a buyer, seller or other party to send a deposit or purchase funds to an account controlled by the criminal. They may impersonate a solicitor, estate agent or buyer, use a lookalike email address, compromise a genuine email account, or send a fake invoice.
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The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) describes business email compromise as including both account compromise and the use of a lookalike address. An attacker may copy or fabricate a genuine conversation and introduce altered bank details at a plausible point in the exchange. A message appearing in an existing thread is not, by itself, proof that its sender or payment instructions are genuine.
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Fraud targeting property title
Property or registration fraud is different from payment diversion. A fraudster may impersonate an owner, buyer, seller, borrower or conveyancer, or use false identity documents to try to transfer a registered title or register a mortgage unlawfully. People who do not live in a property, including landlords and second-home owners, may be particularly exposed to this kind of risk.
A fraudulent application is not the same measure as a reported payment-diversion case. The figures for these risks have different definitions and populations, so they should not be combined into a single estimate of conveyancing cybercrime.
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Ransomware, outages and supplier incidents
An attack on a law firm can disrupt access to case files, email or other systems needed to complete transactions. A supplier incident can have a wider effect if multiple firms depend on the same service. The NCSC’s 2023 report on the UK legal sector recounts a November 2021 attack on the Simplify Group: core systems went offline, completions were delayed and new transactions fell. The report said the incident was reported to have cost the firm £6.8 million; that is a historical reported figure, not a current estimate.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) said in a 2025 conference presentation that the 2023 CTS attack affected more than 80 conveyancing firms. Supplier disruption can interrupt a firm’s work or, depending on the access involved, create a route into its own systems.
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What the reported figures show—and what they do not
Official figures indicate that conveyancing fraud and related risks are material, but they do not come from one unified dataset. Each number below describes a particular reporting channel, period or type of event.
| Measure | Figure | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Conveyancing fraud reported to Action Fraud | 143 cases and £11.7 million in reported losses between April 2024 and March 2025 | HM Land Registry reported these figures in 2025 and said the vast majority of cases involved residential property transactions. They are reported cases and losses, not a count of every incident or an estimate of all UK conveyancing losses. |
| Reports received by the SRA | Three quarters in 2024 involved residential conveyancing | The SRA’s 2025 presentation describes the share of reports it received. This is not an estimate of the share of all incidents across the property sector. |
| Applications to create or update the Land Register | 86 fraudulent applications identified among 4,429,092 applications in 2024–25, just over 0.0019% | HM Land Registry’s 2025 figure concerns registration applications. Its denominator is not comparable with Action Fraud’s reported conveyancing-fraud cases. |
| Property applications stopped | More than £59 million worth of property during 2024–25 | HM Land Registry says it prevented registration of fraudulent applications against property of this value. It is not a measure of money stolen or recovered. |
| Conveyancing-related suspicious activity reports | 73% of the SRA’s suspicious activity reports submitted in 2024–25 | The SRA’s 2024–25 anti-money-laundering report says this share involved conveyancing-related instructions. It reflects money-laundering reporting, not cyber incidents. |
| Email in cybercrime reports | Over 80% of cybercrime reports received by the SRA in 2021 involved email | This is historical SRA reporting data published in its Risk Outlook; it should not be treated as a current proportion. |
These measures answer different questions: reported payment fraud, reports made to a regulator, suspected fraudulent registration applications, property safeguarded from fraudulent applications, money-laundering reports and historical cybercrime reporting. None establishes that conveyancing is the largest cyber threat across all UK real estate.
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Why conveyancing and money laundering overlap without being the same risk
Property transactions move large sums, and client accounts may be used to receive or transfer funds. That makes conveyancing an area of money-laundering concern as well as a target for cyber-enabled fraud. However, the SRA’s figure that 73% of its suspicious activity reports in 2024–25 related to conveyancing instructions is an anti-money-laundering measure—not a count of hacked accounts, phishing attacks or payment-diversion incidents.
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallKeeping the categories separate matters in practice: anti-money-laundering checks help identify suspicious clients or transactions, while cybersecurity controls protect accounts, communications and systems. A firm needs both, but one does not replace the other.
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How conveyancing firms can reduce the risk
No single control prevents every attack. Firms need controls for people, accounts, payments, suppliers and recovery, with clear ownership at senior level. The NCSC says responsibility for cyber security ultimately resides at the top of an organisation, rather than with an IT supplier or department.
Verify identity and payment instructions
- Verify unusual or changed payment instructions through a second trusted channel already known to the firm. Do not use contact details supplied in the message being checked.
- Apply independent identity and transaction checks to clients and other parties. Assess the risks for each matter, document the assessment and revisit it when circumstances or terms change.
- Check the identity and regulatory status of an unfamiliar conveyancer rather than relying only on details in an email or document.
Protect accounts and staff
- Use strong, unique passwords and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for email and critical business systems.
- Train staff to recognise phishing, lookalike addresses and unexpected changes in payment details. Make it straightforward to pause a transaction and escalate a suspicious message.
- If considering a physical security key for MFA, first check that it is compatible with the firm’s systems. It is one possible way to implement MFA, not a substitute for payment checks or other safeguards.
Assess suppliers and prepare for interruption
- Maintain a clear view of suppliers that can access sensitive systems or data. Ask about security readiness, incident notification and continuity arrangements, including relevant dependencies in the supplier chain.
- Keep regular backups and test that they can be restored. Consider offline backups where appropriate to the firm’s risks and systems.
- Plan how to keep essential work going during an outage, communicate with clients, notify insurers and meet applicable regulatory reporting duties. An incident plan should identify who makes decisions and how staff will communicate if normal systems are unavailable.
- Cyber Essentials assessment or readiness resources can provide a baseline route, but they do not replace a broader risk assessment or a rehearsed incident plan.
What buyers, sellers and property owners can do
- Before sending a deposit or purchase funds, confirm the account details using a trusted phone number or another channel established independently—not a number included in a new or unexpected message.
- If bank details change unexpectedly, pause the payment and contact the conveyancer using contact details obtained independently. Do not reply to the message or rely on its phone number to verify it.
- For a property you own, consider HM Land Registry’s free Property Alert service. It can notify you about certain activity on a monitored property, such as a new mortgage application. Treat an alert as a prompt to investigate, not as proof that fraud has occurred.
What firms should do if they suspect an incident
Firms should follow their incident plan, check current official reporting instructions and assess their legal and regulatory duties. The NCSC advises legal firms to report incidents to it, including unsuccessful attacks. Depending on the circumstances, reporting to the SRA may be required; the NCSC also lists Action Fraud for ongoing incidents and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for reportable personal-data breaches. A firm should establish which obligations apply to the specific incident rather than assuming that one report fulfils every duty.
Where payment instructions may have been compromised, alert the relevant conveyancer and financial institution through trusted contact routes as quickly as possible. Preserve relevant emails and records for investigation, and avoid continuing to use a potentially compromised account as the sole channel for coordination.
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