Ever since "Heir Hunters" started on BBC1 the number of "Heir Hunting" companies has mushroomed. I've noticed that series 6 stated there were over 30. Now on series 7 it's over 40. Now most of the new people have just got an interest in the topic and are diving into the TS pool of unclaimed estates. Now apart from the occasional estate worth over one million which will have been very difficult to solve or found to be dead, the majority of the estates on that monthly Ytrasury list are pretty small so companies like my own just work on the newly-advertised cases.
Even on those cases, we are beginning to get tiny firms trying to work them and because often they do not know how to proceed we get the situation, as happened recently, where I have one of my case-managers visiting an heir and there is a phone call to the heir from someone trying to interfere with the discussion.
I know of one person working on her own who got contracts from a number of people on a case with a very common name and then found that the entire estate was worth under £1,000 and her fees would be about £12 in total.
