At our Annual Meeting and Luncheon yesterday, the Northern Arizona Association of Realtors (NAAR), had Brenda from Pioneer Title Agency speak about the rising tide of Wire Fraud.
Since January 2015, there has been a 1300% INCREASE in identified losses, now totalling over 3 BILLION!
Some of the stories were so unbelievable, I had to share:
True Story #1: A title officer’s brother was purchasing a home in Arizona and was scheduled to wire $276,000 for the payment of a home. The day before the wire was scheduled, the brother received an email from the sister’s email that the wiring instructions had changed. He did the wire and called his sister to let her know it had been done. The sister began searching for the wire and told him she had not sent an email with new wiring instructions! After a frantic search, they were able to contact the bank receiving the wire to let them know of the fraudulent activity and placed it on hold. Unfortunately, this is a SLOW process and the brother had to do another wire in the amount of $276,000 to complete the purchase and close on the home. (How many of your clients can do that!?) Brenda, shown here in the presentation, asked if the money had been returned yet and the title officer said it had not because it is a lengthly process to verify all the details, so here it was 6 months later and still nothing!
True Story #2: A couple was selling a second home. The title office receives a call from “the wife” that they have decided to have the home be an investment and the money should now be wired to a separate account set up for their newly formed LLC. The title officer decided to place a call to the customer to verify the information and found out the wife had never made that call! They proceeded with the purchase as originally set up and believe it or not – the “fake wife” called three times to ask where her wire transfer was!!
True Story #3: A couple in Colorado lost their life savings while trying to buy their dream retirement home and filed suit against the bank, the title company, the mortgage company and the realtor alleging that none of them did enough to protect their sensitive financial information. Within 24 hours of closing- they lost everything due to a fraudulent email when someone hacked into one of the companies’ servers and retrieved financial information and then sent a bogus email to the couple!
True Story #4: The protection software from this local title company recorded that over 14,000 attempts were made to hack into their email. (They currently have all emails with sensitive information encrypted and it works well)
It an age of text, voice mail and email, it’s so easy to become busy in real estate transactions, but in order to protect clients from this growing crime – it’s more important to pick up the phone or visit your title company andcommunicate, communicate, communicate!
To Report Wire Fraud contact the bank immediately for a wire recall and report the crime to:
FBI@www.IC3.gov