A new type of mortgage fraud comes as mortgage rates ticked down last week, following a spike caused by the Iran war.
As Channel 2’s Lori Wilson explains, the fraudsters targeted a married couple.
When you buy a home, wiring money is standard. But it almost cost one couple everything.
The couple received an email, with escrow misspelled - that almost cost the couple hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Scott and Lynette, who asked that we not use their last names, had been renters in southern California for years before they cobbled together enough to buy a home.
“We got instructions by Secure Portal to wire the money for a pretty significant down payment,” Scott said.
They were about to wire hundreds of thousands of dollars when a second email arrived with slightly different instructions.
“It was an exact duplicate of any correspondence that we had with the company before,” he said.
Scott and Lynette sent the money.
The next day, though, their mortgage broker told them he received nothing.
“It was identical but for one keystroke,” Scott said.
“So instead of escrow.com, it was escro v-v.com,” Lynette said.
Those two v’s instead of a “w” meant they were communicating with and sending money to someone other than their broker.
“The reality just slowly sets in, like this could not possibly have happened to us,” Lynette said.
“We consider ourselves technologically literate. But we knew at that moment that we were over our head. We literally stopped and we prayed. And then we called the police,” Scott said.
Orange County has one of southern California’s only cybercrime units.
The quicker you recognize it and then take immediate action is key. the likelihood of recovering that money is almost zero after about 72 hours
Investigators were able to trace what happened to Scott and Lynette’s money and started trying to get it back.
“It’s called a financial kill chain. You find it, you freeze it, you stop it,” Sheriff Don Barnes said.
The National Association of Mortgage Brokers says communicating the old fashioned way may help protect you and your money.
“Before you send anything, pick up the phone, call your mortgage broker, call your realtor. Trust and verify, and this situation’s trust, verify, verify and verify,” Kimber White said.
It took months but police were able to recover most of what scammers stole from Scott and Lynette.
“About 10% of the money that apparently had gotten translated into Bitcoin, and that was gone, gone. But close to 90% of our funds came back to us. And it was it was like a dream.
Experts say doublecheck everything and follow up after every step.
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