Happy National Estate Planning Awareness Week to those who celebrate. Remember that the first advice from any attorney to a client in Massachusetts or New York is “move out of Massachusetts [or New York] to a state that doesn’t have an estate tax”. Here’s a map from the Tax Foundation (people with money should move from the colored-in states to the grayed-out states, especially to those grayed-out states that also have no income tax, e.g., New Hampshire, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, etc.):
This post is about Mr. Evans Greenspun, a relative who lived in the United Kingdom and who was unable to spell “Evan” correctly. Evans left $200 million in a Cayman Islands bank but neglected to write a will. Here’s a hardcopy letter from attorney Elliot Barnes that I received this summer about my petroleum chemical engineer relative:
I expect to receive my 50 percent share of the funds imminently and will be following divorce plaintiff MacKenzie Scott Bezos’s example by donating much of it to Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign.
Separately, I’m wondering how the above scam can be profitable given that it required putting a stamp on an envelope (sadly I didn’t save the envelope so I can’t remember if it was actually mailed from the UK). “Attorney” isn’t a title that lawyers in the UK use, is it? “Solicitor”, perhaps, would be more credible? The letterhead street address in London doesn’t match precisely in Google Maps. A first name of “Evans” is likely to raise suspicion; wouldn’t an LLM have suggested changing it to “Evan”?
Discarding the envelope is unfortunate.
In addition to “Attorney”, I love “My name is Mr. Elliott Barnes.”
As Bart Simpson said, “What an odd thing to say”
Address, phone numbers, and Elliot Barnes match with a Ornithos Legal firm webpage ( https://www.ornithoslegal.com/about.html ). “06/16/2025” seems like an odd date format for someone from the UK to use. I guess he’s using a gmail account rather than his corporate account so that he doesn’t have to share with the other partners?
Maybe you can negotiate him down to an 80/20 split?!
I’d be tempted to ask for a down payment/deposit, just to prove it’s legit!
Philip, let us know how it goes. I too received similar letter. I googled, the deceased has newspaper necrolog and public record and law firm has public record. No idea if the deceased is real relative or not, but by the fact that I and my branch of family trashed relationships with conceted egocentric wealthy superachivers from other branches of my extended family, most of whom did not care to reproduce. it is possible. Do not really care about others money and did not reply, but now I think I could use some.