But you need to understand that most wire fraud issues are really email hacks. So let’s try to see what happened in your situation from what we know of other, similar situations we’ve heard about.
The most frequent way hackers get wind that a person is about to wire a large sum of money is by hacking the closing agent’s, real estate attorney’s, settlement agent’s or real estate broker’s email accounts.
Once they hack into any of these email accounts, they monitor the emails, waiting for the right time to copy or mimic the owner of the email account to send out fraudulent wire instructions to an unsuspecting homebuyer. When these hackers send you an email, they will instruct you to wire the funds to their bank account. They may even give you a phone number to call to confirm the wire, but that phone number will be a phony number to a person that is an accomplice to the fraud.
The other way this happens is that the criminals will learn about you through their prior hack and then hack into your email account and monitor the many hacked email accounts they have looking for active real estate transactions. They will then send them a fake email telling them where to wire the money. Again, the information will be fraudulent and any information on the email is there to entice you to fall into the scam.
In the first case, if the settlement agent, lender, broker or other person’s email was hacked, they may have some responsibility for the fraud, and the company or its insurance coverage, may reimburse you. But if your email was hacked, you won’t be able to blame anybody else other than yourself.
Recently Sam had a person who called him with a situation similar to yours. In that instance, the homebuyer’s email had been hacked. The hackers had monitored his email, knew he was buying a home, knew when to send him wire instructions and what to say. And, like you, he lost a considerable amount of money.
No system is completely secure. In fact, the Pentagon hosts hackathons in order to have talented coders and programmers search for ways criminals can break into their systems. But the entire wire system is at risk the way it is handled now and the financial world needs to create a two-step authentication method to safeguard people and their money in these sorts of transactions.
Two-step authentication might look the way it does on your Gmail account; you can activate two-step authentication, so when you login to an account, there is a second security step to make sure that the sender and the receiver are in agreement as to what will transpire in the transaction. We’re not sure what the system would look like, but title companies, escrow companies and settlement agents should come up with a more secure way to set up the system so we safeguard these transactions in a better, smarter and hopefully hack-proof way.
In the meantime, here are a few steps to take to protect yourself: (1) Never wire funds to anybody or any institution unless you have checked the wire instructions independently with your title company, settlement or closing agent. (2) If you can’t or won’t confirm the information over the phone, most title companies, settlement companies and closing agents post their wire instructions online, so be sure you check their official websites. If they do, you can compare those instructions with the instructions you received. (3) Some agents will confirm the instructions you received over the phone if you give them the information you received. Just make sure you are talking to the right person at the right place.
The system is far from perfect now, but we tell our readers to be vigilant and when it comes to wire transfers and to verify and reverify the information from trusted sources. As you found out, if you receive an email, you need to make sure it’s from a trusted source. If you receive a text, you must make sure it’s from a trusted source. If you receive a call, you need to make sure it’s from a trusted source.
In the end, you need to have a good working relationship with your settlement agent to make sure that you know that “trusted” source. We can see the day when you go to see the closing or settlement agent in person and then go to the bank to initiate the wire transfer. That way, you have face to face information with your trusted source.
