Recently one of my closings had a wire scam and got extremely lucky they caught it in the nick of time. The mom a realtor, the son buying a house as first time home buyer. The wire instructions came from title's email however, the email was intercepted and hacked. Mom wired close to $20,000 and when thought something seemed off with a name she never heard of before, made the calls to verify (after the fact). 4 entities got involved, and managed to lock it down in process and freeze the account in the nick of time in the 4th stage she told me before being finalized and out of the country. The money was reversed, so had to wait about 4 days to try and close again, un freeze the account, all sort of things needed to be done. She was extremely lucky....the reason I was aware is when presenting wire instructions, I always tell them to call and verify as well, did they receive them doc-u-sign? She gave me a funny look, and when I showed up, the first thing she did was verify that with her information, and then was wiring this time AFTER the closing. Very common in FL, and even people in the profession do not understand how widespread this is.
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