Beware of Scammers (Real Estate Closing)

[Owee Nicolas]

I'm about to close on my first out-of-state rental property investment when I received an email from the Title Insurance Agent that I need wire the closing funds to avoid delay. The email had my property details and realtor copied so I didn't think anything out of the ordinary. I also did a quick google search on the Title Insurance Agent and he checked out correctly. So I wire transferred the funds. Since it was after 5PM Eastern, I figured it will it be transferred the next business day. The next morning, a person from the customer protection group of my bank called me to confirm if I made the wire transfer. I thought it was just part of their regular check since it was a large sum of money. I told her that the amount was for closing costs of a real estate investment and that I also did research on the Title Insurance Agent. But when she told me that she had concerns on the name of account that I'm transferring the money to (i.e. the person is not an attorney or involved in real estate, etc), that's when I got suspicious. I told them to put the transaction on-hold while I verify. I checked with my realtor about the email and he confirmed that they were all fake emails including his. I immediately called my bank to cancel the transaction. In the end, I was able to save my money. I was very lucky that my bank did their verification.

I'm sharing my experience to warn others about these scammers. They are very good. They had my property, realtor and even title insurance agent information. They even knew that I was about to close on my property. I honestly don't know how they get this information. Here's a good article I found that tells you how you can protect yourself from these scams: https://www.consumerfinance.go...

Stay vigilant. Feel free to share any additional tips you may have. 

[James Ma]

Great warning Owee. Most hackers are very smart nowadays. I used to support businesses with all their tech solution needs in a sales capacity so got to learn a ton about cyber security!

On average, hackers are sitting and gathering information on you for 4-6 months before making their move. As with your story, they find out the most vulnerable targets and highest opportunities to score big before jumping. Usually their emails will appear as being real since it shows their name as the sender but if you look closely at the actual email address it will look off. Hackers may also send out the virus to your contacts as well to mimic you and further spread their virus through attachments or weblinks. Bitcoin farming is another common practice now where they simply install programs to run in the background on your computers or smartphones and you will only notice the speed seems slower.

Hopefully you have a very good anti-virus program as its likely your computer is exposed and they are still lurking in your system. Even having a backup may not be enough as viruses can be backed up too with the rest of your files.