Wire-transfer real estate frauds
Potential homebuyers have a new scam to worry about, said Natalie Wong in Bloomberg Businessweek: hackers stealing their down payments. Real-estate wire fraud is on the rise, with hackers targeting “random players involved in any real estate transaction—lawyers, brokers, title agencies, mortgage lenders.” Once inside a company email system, thieves may “monitor correspondence about a specific transaction for months.” When it’s time for, say, an eager homebuyer to wire a down payment, the thief will send “a fraudulent email to the buyer, pretending to give official instructions from the real estate or title agent.” Danny Gonzales, a homebuyer in Texas, mistakenly wired $123,500 to thieves who had accessed his title agent’s system. The thieves’ email, which came from a Gmail account, “looked identical to hers,…