The Expert Podcast

One of the scariest things we're seeing in financial fraud are these misdirected transfers where it could be a title company doing a real estate closing; it could be a purchase from a company. We had one a couple of weeks ago with a fire department; a municipal fire agency was purchasing a fire truck and they sent their money to pay for the fire truck to the wrong place.

How does this happen? It happens where hackers will break into a system or an email of a company. It could be a small company; it doesn't have to be any of the companies involved in the transaction. It could be an associated company, like a home inspector or even a contractor. On these email chains, we'll have all the information about an upcoming purchase. For example, in a real estate transaction, there are lots of people involved in that transaction: home inspectors, mortgage brokers, insurance companies, utility companies, electrical, cable TV—any of these companies involved in the closing know when the closing is happening.

So a lot of these emails are CC'd to all these people, so everybody knows when the closing is happening, how much it is, what the details are. These hackers will gather up all this information, and at some point they'll say, “You know what? We're going to attack this transaction.” What they do is, when the time is right, they send an email to the person paying the money saying, “Here's where you send the money; here's your wire transfer.” They make the email look like it came from the right place; they have all the right names, all the right logos, all the right information.

The poor buyer sends their money to a hacker, and it's overseas and it's gone. The same thing can happen in business. If you're buying a large piece of equipment, the hackers will monitor it; maybe the suppliers, some low-level tech person—they get the information, they send the buyer the wire transfer information and it's wrong.

This cyber crime is very, very difficult. There's an easy way to prevent it: if you just send a test payment before you send any big amounts by wire transfer. Send $100, $50, whatever it is, and make sure that it goes through properly to the right place. For the kind of money we're talking about, it's very important to prevent it because if you don't prevent it, you could lose all your money for your down payment on a house. If you're a business, you lose your purchase of the equipment. In the case of that fire department, that was money they had saved up for years to buy a new piece of apparatus, and without that, it put their community at risk.

So do this test anytime you send a large transaction. You can check out our website, verifyescrow.com, to give you instructions. There's no cost; it's something that is just a free checklist of how to do a large transaction. You want to send a test wire transfer before you send anything large, and then verify with the actual recipient that they got that small payment before you send the whole amount.

If you have any questions, you can reach our consultation division at actualhuman.com. We'd be glad to talk to you. If you found this video helpful, be sure to click on other videos on our channel to see if there's further information that could give you more insight into resolving your particular situation.