Don't let hackers steal your down payment!

Home buyers! Don't let a hacker steal your down payment, make sure you take the proper steps to keep yourself and your money safe in today's increasingly digital world. Mortgage wire fraud is on the rise and is predicted to double in the next few years. One of the biggest mistakes a home buyer can make is accidentally transferring their downpayment to an account created by a hacker. When this happens, it going to be extremely difficult to trace the money and get it back and the buyer could lose everything. Don't become a statistic, make sure you, your agent, and your escrow company are taking the proper steps to keep your hard earned money safe.

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Josh Alexander

THE brokeredge

JoshAlexanderRealEstate@gmail.com

714.366.2186

DRE#:01974435

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Do you want to know the biggest mistake that buyers are making in today's housing market when it comes to the down payment, as well as deposit, it has everything to do with mortgage wire fraud, it's on the rise, it's becoming more and more of an issue. And if you don't protect yourself, you could be losing 10s of 1000s of dollars during a transaction. So how do you protect yourself, that's what we're gonna talk about on today's episode. So let's go ahead and get into it.

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So as we move farther and farther into a digital world, one of the things that becoming more and more of a problem in the real estate industry is wire fraud. So when buyers go to transfer, the downpayment, their deposit into escrow hackers are getting into these email systems, altering the numbers, and you transfer the money as a buyer, and then all of a sudden, it just disappears. And this can be a couple $1,000 and go up to hundreds of 1000s of dollars, depending how much you're transferring at a time. So needless to say, it's a huge problem that you really have to pay attention to as a buyer, because if it does disappear, oftentimes it's going to be very difficult to trace and get back. So let's go over how this is happening to begin with. So typically, what most hackers are doing is they're basically trying to hack into the escrow company, or title company, depending on your state and trying to get access to their email accounts. And when they do this, what they do is they go into the back end of the email accounts, and they set up forwarding. So every email that goes to the escrow company gets forwarded to them. And by doing this, they have a very good sense of what's going on with every transaction. And so they strategically then send you an email right around the time you're supposed to transfer money into escrow, because again, they know this after monitoring the emails, and they send you an email saying this is where you need to transfer the money, they have the dollar amount, because they see the email communication. And so the dollar amount seems correct. But they go and say transfer the money to this account. And you do that. And again, all of a sudden, the money disappears, escrow never gets it. And oftentimes, it's really difficult to recover, especially if it's been more than 12 to 24 hours, after 24 hours of this happening, it's almost impossible to get your money back. Because oftentimes, it's transferred so many different bank accounts off shores, that it's really hard to track down. So again, this is something that you need to be very careful of. So how do you do that? Well, let's go over two different things. Number one has to do with what you can do to protect yourself. And number two has to do what the agent should be doing protect you as well as you're going through escrow. So let's start with you. What can you be doing to protect yourself. So number one, if you get an email from what seems like your escrow company, giving you a full account number of where to transfer money, and it's an unsecure message, that should be a red flag that never happens in this industry anymore, because wire fraud is such an issue. And it's becoming more and more of an issue. Escrow companies and title companies have taken proactive steps to make sure that they are not giving full account numbers over your email. So that way, if you see that full account number, you should know immediately something is fishy. So make sure you look out for that. Number two, before you wire any money anywhere, you should always be talking to your real estate agent first, because they're also going to help to confirm that that's the right email address that it came from. It's the right phone number. It's the right escrow company to make sure you have a double check in place. So you're not again wiring money, and then all of a sudden it disappears. So the third thing you can do is when you first get into escrow, you can look up that escrow company online, visit their main web page, and just double check that the email they're using as well as the phone number using matches what you've seen in your inbox so far, because that's a good double check, just to make sure there's nothing fishy going on. And then once you verify that, that email and that phone number are the same, then you want to make sure that anytime escrow requests you to send money, you're always calling them to confirm because that's obviously a less a digital environment when you're speaking to them over the phone. So that way, they can confirm the right account number that confirm where everything's supposed to be going. And you know for certain that it's going to be transferred to the right location. So again, make sure you talk to your real estate agent, make sure you watch out for those full account numbers and your email bodies. And then make sure you're doing your own research. If you have time to look into the escrow company, make sure that you have the right contact information. And then always call the escrow company to verify the account number before you transfer anything. So now let's go ahead and look on the second side of things what your agent should be doing, again to help protect you during the escrow process. So number one, what I typically do is as soon as I open escrow, and as soon as we get the first escrow email, I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to cross check that with the company I find online. And then secondly, I'm going to take that information and also relay it to the sellers agent as well because typically in California, usually the seller is choosing the escrow company in many cases. So I want to make sure that the selling agent also confirms this is the right escrow company. This is the right phone number, the right representative, and that way I'm double checking everything and then I write that information down So I have it on file. So that way, when you do get a request for someone to transfer money, I have the correct email, I

5:06

have the correct phone number. And I can cross reference that because one of the biggest issues with these hackers getting into emails is oftentimes they create a new email address might only be one letter off from what escrows actual email addresses. So it's extremely hard to tell unless you're looking very carefully, if it's a correct email or something that's slightly off, the hackers are trying to use to again, get access to your account, so you can transfer them money. So make sure when you're double checking the escrow email and phone number, you're looking at every single digit, every single letter to make sure that it matches 100%, which again, is something that I do, but it's something that you can do as a buyer as well, just to double check and make sure your money is not going to disappear. And then the last thing I do is that every time that escrow gives a request, I asked my buyers to let me know. And then I confirm all those details, like I said before, so these are really double and triple checks that are put into place that really prevent this from happening and 99.9% of the cases, however, it's something that you have to be very vigilant for, like I said, hackers have gotten very sophisticated, they know how to deceive you, they know by just altering one letter, most people are not going to catch that. So it's extremely important before you transfer money anywhere that you're double and triple checking all this contact information, as well as the account it's supposed to go in. So if both you and your agents do all these steps, you're typically not going to have any issues when you're transferring money within escrow. So it's just something again, that you need to know as a buyer when you're going into escrow and even before you go into escrow, so you know what to look for, you know, the checks and balances that need to be put in place to make sure your money never disappears. So if you found this information useful, and you want to stay updated on what's going on in the housing market, how to protect yourself, and tricks and tips for both buyers and sellers. Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter. I put it out once a week letting you know everything that's going on. And you can do that either in the description below or the link in my bio, depending on where you're watching this. And also if you find this content useful, please hit that like and the subscribe button. And if you think you know someone that might find this useful, please consider sharing it with him as well. I would really appreciate it. So until next week's episode, stay healthy, stay happy, and I will see you on the next show.