Thread by @atxREpodcast

Almost fell victim to real estate related wire fraud this evening.

If I hadn’t been paying close attention to the grammar and word choice, I might have lost $400,000.

This fraudster is pretty cunning. Here’s how it worked: 🧵

I am currently under contract to purchase a $400k property on Wednesday.

In preparation of closing, I read the closing statement & planned to wire money tomorrow

This evening, I got a two emails from my escrow officer asking if her emails were going through.

I replied to the second email saying, “yes, the email came through, but I got duplicates”

She said, “sorry it’s glitchy. Let me get you wire instructions. So we can put the funds in an interest bearing account until the closing.”

Then I got another email.

She said “attached wire instructions, please send first thing tomorrow and call to confirm.”

At this point my gut instinct kicked in & I started to look closer. I noticed the word “interest bearing.”

In my RE experience I seldom heard that phrase and never from escrow.

Then it dawns on me the email is totally fake. The grammar wasn’t punctuated well and the word choice was more British English than American English.

So I decided to call. It was a fake Google voice number. No answer.

Then I look at the actual email.

The email was a fake version:

Abc@123 .com was faked as
Abc@1233 .com

There were 3 escrow assistants cc’d and an escrow team email. They were also all fake. Exact replicas of the email signature and font, but fake emails and numbers.

My theory is that the fraudster..

My theory is that The Fraudster logged in the escrow email account and didn’t click anything.

Then waited to send an exact duplicate email within minutes of the first email hoping the end recipient would cc the wrong thread.

Makes me shutter. It was to real. Always call! End/