Due to the nature of our work, at first glance of receiving a letter from us it is an automatic thought to think that this must be a scam. Rest assured it is not a scam.

You can tell a scam from the genuine article when there are promises or demands of huge sums of money – we do neither.

All we ask is that we are compensated for the research costs by way of a percentage of the amount that you will receive. This ensures that we will always receive from you far less than you will actually receive.

There are two reasons you need to supply id:

1. The Treasury who hold the money of the deceased person need to make sure that we have found the rightful heirs. They cannot release any money without proof that you are the right person.

2. The law states that any person who is bankrupt cannot directly receive an inheritance from another person. Therefore we must prove that you are not bankrupt. If you are bankrupt please advise us as soon as possible.

As much as we would love to tell you to order that new car and give up your job the chances are this is not going to be the case. Statistically, people with large sums of money do make wills, therefore if there was a large sum of money that person would have made a will and thus the Treasury would not be involved. It is generally those that only have a few thousand who think they do not need a will and don’t get round to writing one – Hence why the Treasury get involved in the first place.

There are considerable costs involved when researching family trees, we will not ask you for any money up front. We do however need to recover research costs, therefore we only ask a percentage of any money you receive. This percentage will be explained to you in our introductory letter and the contract we ask you to sign. This ensures that we will only be paid if your claim is successful and that our fees will always be in proportion to your share of the inheritance – ensuring our research fees are never larger than your part of the inheritance.

In the early stages we cannot tell you the name of the person whose estate we are working on. This is nothing sinister, it is quite usual. This is because during the early stages of our work we have not completed all of the research. In addition, as you should hopefully appreciate, even to get to this stage it has cost us a considerable amount of time and money to even trace you. We must be in a position to be able to recover our costs before we release information relating to the estate we are dealing with.

You can help us speed up the process by letting us have any information relating to your family that you may have. Remember no one person’s memory is the same. Even if we have already spoken to a member of your family it could be that you remember just the tiniest piece of additional information that may help us to resolve a case and thus pay out even quicker. 

Generally the whole process can vary considerably however you can expect that, from the first letter you receive, the timescale will be approximately 6-9 months. This is simply because, for the majority of the cases, we work with the Treasury Solicitor. The Treasury Solicitors is a government department, they deal with thousands of cases and regrettably the time taken is simply beyond our control.