BASALT · JOURNAL
Redacting property and conveyancing documents
Property files carry a combination that is unusually attractive to fraud: verified identity documents, bank details, and a known large payment about to happen on a known date.
What comes out before a file leaves the office
Client identity documents, which are photographs and must be redacted as images. Bank account details on completion statements and funding letters. Source of funds evidence, which is frequently a bank statement covering matters far beyond the transaction. Personal contact details of parties who do not need to reach each other. Details of a lender's internal reference or valuation where not disclosable.
The fraud angle
Conveyancing is a persistent target for payment redirection fraud, and much of what makes it possible is disclosed rather than discovered: who the parties are, which firm acts, the completion date, and the amount.
A file shared more widely than necessary increases that exposure directly. Redaction here is not only a privacy obligation but a practical fraud control.
Source of funds evidence
This is the most over-disclosed material in a property file. A client asked to evidence a deposit frequently supplies six months of statements covering everything they spend money on, and the whole thing goes into the file.
Only the relevant credits are needed. The rest should not travel with the file, and it is worth extracting the relevant pages rather than redacting the whole run.
Identity documents
Passport and driving licence scans are images. Redacting them means destroying pixels, and a drawn box is trivially removed.
Checks before sending
Extract text and search for account numbers, which appear in more places than expected: on covering letters, in payment instructions, and in email threads pasted into the file.
Read metadata, which in documents produced by case management systems frequently carries a matter reference and the fee earner's name.
Look at every image at full size, since an image failure is invisible in a text search.
Retention
The unredacted originals stay in the file. What leaves is a copy. That distinction matters if the transaction is later disputed and the file has to show what was held at the time.
This is a description of common practice rather than legal advice. Obligations vary by jurisdiction and by the terms you are working under, and the authority that governs your work is the one to check with.
Frequently asked questions
What should be redacted from conveyancing files?
Client identity documents, bank details on completion statements and funding letters, source of funds evidence beyond the relevant credits, personal contact details of parties who do not need them, and lender internal references where not disclosable.
Why does redaction matter for property fraud?
Payment redirection fraud depends on knowing the parties, the firm, the completion date and the amount. A file shared more widely than necessary discloses exactly that, so redaction is a practical fraud control as well as a privacy obligation.
How should source of funds evidence be handled?
Extract only the relevant credits rather than carrying whole statement runs in the file. Clients routinely supply months of unrelated spending, and none of it needs to travel with the transaction.
How do I redact a passport or licence scan in a property file?
As an image: the pixels must be destroyed and the image re-encoded. A drawn box over the document number is an annotation and is removed by the recipient in one operation.
Doing it in Basalt
Basalt is a native macOS PDF toolkit built around redaction that removes content rather than covering it. After writing a file it re-opens its own output with an independent parser, searches for the material again, and refuses to save if anything is found. It also strips metadata, XMP, attachments, embedded scripts and hidden layers as part of the same operation, and a separate Inspector reports what any PDF still hides, including documents Basalt did not create. Everything runs on your Mac: the engine holds no network entitlement at all, which macOS enforces at the code-signature level. A one time $29 licence covers up to three Macs, free for the first 24 hours. basaltformac.com, or brew install --cask chipmunk1101/tap/basalt.
Redaction that proves itself
Basalt destroys the content you mark, then re-opens the file it wrote and proves the content is gone before it saves anything. Your documents never leave your Mac.