Hours before your zoning hearing, an email lands in your inbox. It appears to come from a municipal official. It cites your exact property address and application number, attaches an official-looking invoice on municipal letterhead, and warns that your project will be pulled from tonight's agenda unless you wire an escrow payment immediately. It is a scam—and it is costing land use applicants real money.
Developers and individual property owners with pending applications before zoning and planning boards have become targets of sophisticated new phishing schemes built on fraudulent payment demands. The emails are convincing, the pressure is deliberate, and funds wired to a scammer are often impossible to recover. Knowing how the scam works is your best defense.
How to recognize the scam:
- Emails appear to come from municipal officials, often citing your specific property address, application number, or project details pulled from public records to seem legitimate.
- Fake invoices and escrow deposit or replenishment demands are dressed up with municipal letterhead.
- Correspondence contains manufactured urgency—frequently timed days, or hours, before a scheduled hearing, with a threat to remove your application from an agenda unless paid immediately.
- Correspondence demands payment by wire or online portal and is sent directly to you rather than coordinated through your counsel.
The one rule that defeats this scam: your land use attorney should always coordinate application fees, escrow deposits, and replenishment requests. Confirm any municipal payment request with counsel before you transfer a dollar.
Never wire money or send payment in response to an unsolicited email or phone call. Treat every unexpected or “urgent” request for payment—by wire, online portal, or any other means—as potential fraud until proven otherwise. Accurate project details or an apparent municipal sender proves nothing; scammers rely on exactly that information to make the request look real.
If you receive a suspicious payment request, protect yourself:
Stop. Do not reply, open attachments, click links, or send any payment.
Verify independently. Contact the municipality's planning or zoning office using the telephone number published on its official website—never the contact information provided in the email. If you receive a suspicious phone call, hang up and call back through that published number.
Loop in counsel before you act. Promptly notify your land use attorney to confirm whether any fee, escrow deposit, or replenishment request is legitimate, and to verify the correct amount, payment instructions, and proper municipal recipient.
A member of our land use team is ready to help you vet any payment request or respond to a suspected scam. When in doubt, contact us before you act—confirming a request takes minutes, and it is far easier than trying to claw back a wire that is already gone.
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NOTE: Associate Nicole Frankel contributed to the writing of this alert. Her bar admission is pending.
