What is Wire Fraud and How to Protect Yourself - YouTube

okay so today I'm going to talk to you about wire fraud I want you to know what

it is how it is going to affect you in real estate and also how to prevent it

and my own personal story that just happened this morning about wire fraud

so first of all what is wire frauds well basically it is just that a thief

steals you're money using a wire transfer basically so how do they do

this so because it's becoming very very

common a lot of people don't know about it they don't know what it is they don't

know how to prevent it so let's go over like in related to real estate how this

works so in your normal real estate transaction you have the buyer who will

wire money to the title company at least in Florida that's the most common way that we

do it they will wire money to the title company the title company after

closing will then wire money to the seller now occasionally if say the

seller is upside down they actually may have to bring funds to closing so the

seller may send money to the title company and so both or all three

the buyer the seller and the title company can all be victims so but how

does it work okay so the way the thief actually gets the money is by spoofing

so what is spoofing well that's when a person pretends to be someone by an

email so you may get an email a spoof email sorry I've got my S right

there that looks like it's from your realtor or it may look like it's from

the title company or it may look like it's from your banker and what the email

generally will say is oh we need to change your wiring instructions so what

happens then is they'll give you a legitimate bank account network routing

number they'll have the legitimate name on the account and they'll say just

wire to that instead so what happens though if you do that if you're the

buyer you're just sending money directly to the thief and once that money is in

the thief's account it immediately goes out

to a different account they've got it set up where it'll just it'll it'll take the

money away immediately so you're likely to never ever see the money again and so

so how do you prevent this right like it's kind of hopeless like how can you tell

know the difference between a legitimate you know and one that is fake

well luckily there are some big giveaways first of all there's grammar

generally speaking everything I've seen so far related to wire fraud the

the the English is not very good the grammar is bad the punctuation is

wrong it just it just doesn't sound right

so use your gut on that another big thing is that the name on the account

will be different than the title company so if the title company you know first

international title is doing your closing it needs to have the name

first international title on the account but in the cases where you are

victim of wire fraud this name gets changed to something different

and lastly any change really any sort of change especially at the last minute

right before closing that needs to be a huge red flag where you say wait a minute why

are things changing for example the title company that we took a class about

wire fraud from the said they never ever ever in their whole history ever changed the

wiring instructions so it should be a huge red flag if you're suddenly getting

email saying the instructions have changed so what can you do instead so

what you can do instead is simply to say to the title company if you were to get

an email just call the title company in fact we always tell our customers call

the title company and get the instructions directly from them and even

go visit to the title company get those instructions and then physically

take that to your bank basically never trust an email that you get especially

when it comes to wire instructions it doesn't matter how encrypted they look

anything like that just call the title company is a quick and easy step that

can prevent so much of this so so why is it important

because the money is gone if if you wire the money out you're never going to

see it again and it can we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars every

single day they're just getting sent out and to never be heard from again because

it's just so hard for the authorities to deal with this because you know usually

across state lines and it's you know in different countries so it's just a big

mess quite frankly so my personal experience it was actually this morning

I get an email from what looks like my broker it says his name up at the top

but luckily my husband had also gotten the same email and he noticed that the name

on the actual email address was different and so that was big red flag

and then we also heard that that person was trying to get money and so I just

kind of played along with with the person on the other end of the email

because I really wanted to see where was this going to go I figured it was going

to be wire fraud of some some sort but here's how it played out for me

the first thing that they asked me to do there was a sense of urgency I can't get

to the bank and I really need you to do this for me and so I said oh sure

what what do you need me to do and they said oh well I need you to Western Union

this person this amount of money about 1,200 bucks so they gave me the person's

address and name so I went ahead forwarded that over to the Western

unions fraud department but I thought well you know I'll just tell the person

I can't do it and we'll leave it at that but then what happened was he or she I

don't know which one it was said well if you can't do that could you send

a wire you can you do that from your phone and I said oh I think I can

do that for my phone you know I've sent wires before so that's when he sent me

the wiring instructions which were I had an actual name an account number and

routing number so the name of the bank so I immediately called that Bank it was

actually a bank in Kansas and I told them exactly what had happened I ended up

talking to the guy in their fraud department and he said oh you could

please give me that email so I sent him the email so hopefully they can get that

all straightened out on their end maybe we prevented at least one theft today

but and our broker actually called them too so the point is it was there were

some big red flags the grammar wasn't good the name this from

name so in other words it says my brokers name but then the email address

was different so that's a red flag but the thief can be really tricky they

can make it look like it's from that right email address so don't use that as

like oh it looks like it came from him just basically never trust any kind of thing

about wire about Western Union just basically trust but verify

actually don't trust and always verify when it comes to wire fraud so I hope that was

helpful please share it with everybody you know because this is becoming a more

and more common thing