By Carole Hawkins
Have you, a Realtor, ever sent an email to a client about wiring closing funds?
Margy Grant, general counsel for Florida Realtors, has simple advice.
“No email with regard to wiring instructions, nada, zilch, none. … It’s just too dangerous right now,” she said.
A wire fraud scam that’s swept the nation recently targeted a local Realtor, according to a Northeast Florida Association of Realtors alert.
It went like this:
After a home sale closed, the settlement agent contacted the Realtor. He said he had received the Realtor’s email saying the seller had shredded their proceeds check and wanted the funds to be wired.
The Realtor hadn’t sent the emails. They were sent by a scammer who had hacked into the Realtor’s email account.
Grant said she learned long ago, as general counsel for Florida Realtors, that she had to create sophisticated passwords to keep hackers out of sensitive communications.
It meant giving up Patriots123, a password derived from her favorite sports team. Apparently anything with 123 is a very easy code to crack.
“I’m running out of children’s names. I’m going to have to rename one of my dogs,” said Grant, speaking at Florida Realtors’ District One Conference.
It’s important to use capital letters and icons that are not letters or numbers.
A password should be about eight characters and changed every six months.
But there’s someone else who hasn’t heard about sophisticated email passwords. Homebuyers. Scammers are now hacking into email accounts, Grant said. Here’s how that goes:
A Realtor puts together a closing. In an email she says to the buyer, “Hey, heads up. Liberty Title is going to send you wiring instructions. Keep an eye out for that email in the next couple of days.”
Twenty-four hours later the buyer gets an email from Liberty Title. But it’s not Liberty Title. It’s a scammer.
Florida Realtors have seen at least four cases where tens of thousands of dollars have been wired to a criminal, Grant said.
And the criminals are getting more sophisticated.
“They used to use bad grammar and broken English and words were spelled the wrong way,” she said. “But this last one I got? I would have been fooled.”
Grant called on Realtors to stop using emails with wiring instructions altogether. She also asked Realtors to spread the word.
Make sure title agents also know not to send emails with wiring instructions, she said. Instead, the homebuyer should phone the title company and get those instructions verbally.