I had my first experience with wire fraud. A front row seat. I called my customer the day before closing to give her the amount she needed to bring to closing in the form of a cashier’s check. About two hours after our phone call, she got an email from my assistant (I was on the CC:) with wiring instructions. It looked legit. It had my assistant’s signature line with our Pilgrim Mortgage graphics. What the customer didn’t notice was that it wasn’t the same email address. Instead of [email protected] it was [email protected] Can you spot the difference?
Without calling the title company or the loan officer (me) or my assistant, she wired a huge chunk of money. The day of closing someone called her pretending to be from the title company to confirm she sent the wire.
Around 6:00 the afternoon we closed, I got a frantic text from the realtor and the customer. The wire did not arrive. That’s when I discovered she had wired her down payment money, instead of getting a certified check.
Thankfully, we caught it right away and we were able to get the wired money back to her account within 1 day of reporting the fraud. We were very lucky.
After talking to the FBI agent, here’s what I discovered.
- The customer had logged in to a bogus real estate website and unknowingly downloaded malware
- The malware was able to watch her every move on her computer
- The malware gave the hackers access to her email
- The hackers patiently waited for the opportunity to insert themselves into the real estate transaction.
- Neither the Title Company nor the Mortgage company were hacked. It was the customer’s personal computer.
What to do? Never wire money in a real estate transaction unless you have called the title company to confirm the wiring details. Better yet, don’t wire money. Take a cashier’s check.
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