Many professionals will recall the boom property market of the mid-to-late 1980s and the consequent aggressive lending policies of banks and building societies.
They will also recall the lax lending policies and controls that were exploited by mortgage fraudsters, which became apparent when the property market crashed and which led to large numbers of claims against, in particular, solicitors and surveyors.
These frauds of the late 1980s and early 1990s primarily concerned residential properties. They were commonly perpetrated by way of sub-sales, back-to-back sales and/or direct payments - mechanisms intended to disguise the fraudulent nature of the underlying transactions. The swathe of litigation that followed in the early 1990s set a number of significant legal precedents and resulted in the Law Society issuing guidance on warning signs that all solicitors should look out for when acting for both borrower and lender in a property transaction. As the property market began to
