The strange case of the missing inheritance © 2024 by Mark McWiggins

Starting in early December I started getting messages from this Swiss attorney I’ll call Hans (not his real name).

He started sending me messages saying that this cousin I had never heard of had died intestate (i.e.) without a will leaving me with … plenty (that’s all the characterization I’m going to make of the amount, so don’t ask.)

Negatives of the deal:

The guy is supposed to be a Swiss probate attorney, but at best he’s kind of a flake (let his whole website and operation go down while he was in the tropics or somewhere during the winter) and ignored my offer of free consulting on how this shouldn’t happen again.

Also he started saying I needed to put up $7000 US to get the UK transfer agent to release the funds.

I have been trying to authenticate the deal remotely from the US, and it’s been difficult (i.e. impossible so far) … I have emailed the courts where this stuff is alleged to have happened and just got … crickets.

I have hired a genealogist to try and figure out where the guy (who has my last name but I’m not mentioning his first and middle names here) … fits into our family tree.

No results on this yet.

The negatives: this has all the looks of the ‘pigeon drop’ scam.

For all I know this isn’t a Swiss attorney but 2 chipmunks in Belarus

The positives: who would make up the name ‘McWiggins?’

Although Hans has been presurring me with deadlines, if this a Real Deal somewhere down the line, I should be able to hire a UK attorney to get the money out of where Hans has it squirreled away and send the same (highly lucrative) deal to UK attorneys with one caveat: no upfront money from us.

I have hired some UK attorneys on the cheap on this Just Answer platform ($50 or so per month … who could hire an attorney anywhere so cheap).

I’ve worked with two so far: one who characterizes the docs I sent as “cheap Photoshop Forgeries” and discounted my suggestion that it’s just scanner artifacts after being scanned twice.

And one who verified that the original place Folkestone CT in the UK was a real place that was just absorbed into some other court as an administrative thing.

That’s it; if you have any suggestions I’d really appreciate hearing them