I’m worried my mother is being scammed. Can anyone translate this for me? I get the gist, but the buraeucractic stuff I don’t understand.
“An dieser Stelle finden Sie Kurzbiografien zu jüdischen Bürgern, gegen die FA aus Essen einen Steuersteckbrief erlassen haben.”
My mum got an email, supposedly from a company in Germany, allegedly employed by the state to track down descendants of the intestate. My maternal grandfather’s nephew has recently died without any descendents, other than my mother and her siblings. The email states that she may have inherited something from this second cousin (or cousin once removed, I can never remember which) and that he had no will, so the State is the only other possible inheritor.
My grandfather was Jewish and emigrated from Germany to South Africa in 1938. He was married in the 1920s, but the marriage was dissolved because of the Nuremburg laws and there are no surviving children from that marriage. He received reparations in the 1970s from the German government because he lost his house, job, marriage etc. The emailer knows all of these things.
My mother knows very little about my grandfather’s life, relatives or anything else before his emigration, and is understandably anxious to get any information she can, so is replying to these emails.
I’m worried that this is leading up to a scam of some sort, so I’m Googling my grandfather and his nephew in order to try and find what information is publically available to any scammers in order to try and work out how genuine they might be. My German is very basic, so I’m running into difficulties, and Babelfish only takes me so far. Any help would be appreciated.
Never heard of it from Germany. My lost relatives all seem to have been from Nigeria.
Personally, I think you need to trust your instincts on this one. The number of times an international inheritance windfall email is legitimate is vanishingly small. Real lawyers communicate in hard-copy documents for anything important.
I mentioned it to a co-worker who first of all said that it the sentence had some strange grammar. It was some sort of a notice that you can find out information about Jewish German citizens who have had some sort of notice of investigation into their taxes.
Based on the strange grammar, I would best advise caution too.
Well, I’ve googled the sentence (which indeed has strange grammar if taken in the context you describe), and it seems to have come from this page, which does not have any affiliation with the state or any company, but seems to be some kind of history project. And since in the context of the web page, the grammar makes sense, I think this is where the sentence must have originated. Why was it included in the e-mail? Was your mother advised to look at the web page to see if your grandfather was included in the tax investigation?
I’d be wary of the e-mail, too, if the origin of that quote was not identified. If you want to, I could take a look at the e-mail and tell you exactly what it says and if it seems like a scam to this native German speaker. My e-mail’s in the profile.
Just a literal translation of the sentence you’re quoting:
“An dieser Stelle finden Sie Kurzbiografien zu jüdischen Bürgern, gegen die FA aus Essen einen Steuersteckbrief erlassen haben.”
“Here [literally: at this place] you will find short biographies of Jewish citizens against which FA [from the website, I conclude that this is meant to be short for Finanzamt, the German tax collecting authorities] from Essen [a city in North Rhine-Westphalia] issued wanted posters for tax reasons”
The grammar itself is proper, although one stumbles across the abbreviation FA in conjunction with the verb haben, which definitely is a plural form; this is resolved if you know that FA is meant to be the plural short form of Finanzamt.
Nonetheless, I’ve never heard of such a thing as a wanted poster issued by a German tax authority, so I’d be wary. If you want to be sure, you might want to contact competent authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia and ask them about that. The e-mail address of the Ministry of Finance there is presse@fm.nrw.de
Sounds fishy to me. The sentence “An dieser Stelle finden Sie Kurzbiografien zu jüdischen Bürgern, gegen die FA aus Essen einen Steuersteckbrief erlassen haben.” sounds like Babelfish product. On the other hand the text can be found here: http://home.arcor.de/kerstinwolf/essen.htm - seems to be a legitimate historical research project that the e-mail might just have copied texts from
Literally, as noted above, it means (corrected for grammar), “In this place you find short biographies for Jewish citizens against which the FA from Essen have issued a tax wanted poster”. FA possibly means Finanzamt i.e. (tax) Revenue Service.
Apparently Steuersteckbriefe were public ‘wanted’ documents issued by the financial authorities of Nazi Germany for purposes of fleecing emigrants (esp. Jews) of most of their assets. They are not legal documents of today, and nobody is tasked to execute them.
There are some entrepreneurs in Germany who specialize in finding heirs of people who died intestate, against a cut from the sum inherited (as the state only inherits if no relatives are found at all, the nearest relative, who inherits, can be quite a distant one who may have never known the decedent when he was alive). Of course someone can impersonate such a firm by way of an advance fee fraud.
If the writer claims to help someone to an inheritance claim, you should ask for the name of the responsible Nachlassgericht (the local court at the decedent’s last residence, which is responsible for ruling on the inheritance). It would by named Amtsgericht Such-and-such-town. You could than check with that court if there is actually such a decedent and an inheritance at issue.
To expand a bit: I read a magazine article a year or two ago (no cite) on the entrepreneurs I mentioned. Don’t know here exactly, so no cite.
Apparently, with people dying intestate and with no heirs raising their claim, the Nachlassgericht posts a notice in the local paper for any heirs to contact them. The entrepreneurs I mentioned take it from there and try to find relatives using the usual tools of genealogical research including publications such as the list you mentioned. I don’t recollect reading on how the researcher then avoids the heirs stiffing him.
Thanks guys.
The text I quoted was from the website linked to, it wasn’t in the email. I’m just trying to find out what info about my grandfather is out there for anyone looking, and a lot of the stuff that was in the email is easily available by Googling (like the name of my grandfather’s first wife etc).
As I mentioned, we do know my grandfather’s nephew has died recently, but weren’t aware there was no will. My mother and her siblings would be the next of kin (he was a childless widower with no siblings and no living relatives on his mother’s side…80 year old German Jews tend not to have much extended family alive).
tschild- thanks for the info, I’ll pass it on to mum.
Actually it does sound like this is more like one of the legitimate entrepreneurs, rather than a scam, as no requests for money or any cut of the inheritence have so far been forthcoming.
I got a very small – we’re talking a couple hundred bucks – refund from such a service for a long-forgotten public-utility deposit. What the guy did, as a business, was comb the “unclaimed property” lists for various states, try to track down the owners or beneficiaries, and then direct them to the money or property for a finders’ fee. He found me, sent me a letter, asked for I think 10% of the amount of money I would get back. I said fine. What was key to me, though, and why I was confident he was legitimate, is he did not want, and would not take, any money up front. You get your money, and then you pay him. I’m sure some people have screwed him in the past, but he flat-out told me, “The way you tell a legitimate asset-locator from a scam-artist is that a legitimate asset-locator will never ask you for money up front.”
So I say go ahead and follow up; there really may be some money in it for your mom. Just don’t agree to pay anything before you get the property.
No, as I said, sometimes they ask for money and it is NOT a scam. There really are services out there that do this sort of thing, and they expect to be paid. The key is that you shouldn’t give them any money BEFORE the service is performed.