Fraudsters have ripped off Burges Salmon's website and even renamed some of its partners as part of a scam.

The con artists replicated large chunks of Burges Salmon's website and rebranded the firm as 'Owen & Harvey Solicitors'.

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In an attempt to give the impression that Owen & Harvey is run by competent lawyers and not a fraudster in Abuja, the scammers also lifted the profiles of three Burges Salmon partners and a senior associate. Two of them have even been promoted to name partners, although not actually with their own names.

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'Browne & Soar' would have been a more appropriate name

The website for Owen & Harvey, which has no genuine connection to joint RollOnFriday Firm of the Year 2016 winner Burges Salmon, seems to have been created to convince people who receive scam emails from fake lawyers that they are dealing with a genuine firm. RollOnFriday investigators, masquerading as prospective client 'Chris Akabusi', tried to make contact with 'James Harvey', but did not receive a response.

A spokesman for the SRA told RollOnFriday that the growing instances of fake sites are an area of "great concern" but there was very little it could do besides issuing scam alerts. "If we can identify the website host", he said, "we contact them to point out that they are providing a service for con artists. This can lead to them taking the site down". Often, however, the scammers are based overseas, "which makes it even more difficult to do anything, both for us and the police".

A spokesman for Burges Salmon told RollOnFriday that as soon as the firm discovered the fake site it asked the relevant ISP and website hosts to take it down. “We’re confident that will happen over the next few days", he said, but added, "We’re pretty irritated by this and hope that no-one is taken in by the fake site. Hopefully anybody visiting it will quickly realise that it’s bogus”. The firm's hopes on both fronts may be optimistic, given that the Owen & Harvey website looks pretty convincing and at least one scam site which the SRA flagged in February is still operating.