Key to a Fortune star on 'scam' fear over Channel 4 show

ok.co.uk:

It’s Location, Location, Location meets Who Do You Think You Are? over on Channel 4 as its latest show – Key To A Fortune – tracks down the rightful inheritors of grand properties, left to them by distant relatives with no will.

Hosted by A Place In The Sun star Jean Johansson, the new series surprises unsuspecting heirs with these ownerless homes, giving them the choice to develop the property themselves – or sell it for a cash windfall.

While randomly inheriting an expensive house sounds too good to be true, it’s a reality for the show’s contributors – although Jean admits that they struggled to convince their heirs that they weren’t being tricked by Channel 4. “When our researchers would call up and say, ‘You’re coming on the show and inheriting a property,’ they often thought it was a scam phone call,” she laughs. “So it’s always lovely when they arrive and realise that it is real, that they’re going to be on TV and it’s going to be a lovely little journey.” The Scottish TV presenter, 42, leapt at the chance to present Key To A Fortune, which she says is unlike other property shows. “It has the element of long-lost families getting back together and the chance to upgrade a property or do some work on it, so I think it brought together a lot of elements,” she says.

Episode one follows South African mum Storme and her daughter as they discover that they’re the only heirs to a dilapidated cottage in rural Kent, which originally belonged to a distant relative they had never met. “The person who had left them this property lived so close by and yet they didn’t even know them,” Jean says. “They came from so far away and inherited this beautiful little house.