Real estate runs on wires, and wire fraud runs on borrowed identities. The FBI has ranked business email compromise among the costliest crimes for years, and real estate closings are its favorite hunting ground: large transfers, deadline pressure, and a chain of strangers – buyer, seller, agent, title, lender, bookkeeper – who mostly know each other by email address.
This week it happened to us
Our own firm was approached by an enquiry impersonating a real, licensed broker from another state. The writing was professional. The behavior was flawless – they used our booking link, confirmed the appointment politely the same morning. Two details gave it away, and both took five minutes to check: the email domain was a near-miss variant of the real broker’s website, and the phone number’s area code sat a thousand miles from where the real broker is licensed. We verified against the published record before the call, shared nothing, and the impersonator no-showed.
Behavior is no longer a filter
The lesson is not that we were clever. It is that conduct can no longer be your screen. Scammers now book appointments, write follow-ups, and sound conscientious – the performance is part of the product. The only filter that works is identity: check what the person claims against what the public record says, using contact details you look up yourself, never the ones they hand you.
The three moments the habit matters most
Before you wire. Call the title company on the number from their website – not the number in the email – and confirm instructions verbally. Changed wiring instructions late in a closing are presumed fraudulent until proven otherwise. This single habit defeats most closing fraud outright.
Before you grant access. Bank feeds, portals, and books access go only to counterparties verified through a channel you found independently. Anyone can ask politely; identity is what earns access.
Before you pay a new vendor. An invoice from a new payee gets its details confirmed by a phone call to a number you sourced yourself. The invoice that arrives mid-project with slightly changed payment details is the classic move.
Where your books fit in
A ledger where every transaction carries a real payee, reconciled monthly against the bank, is where a fraudulent payment surfaces fast. A pile of uncategorized transactions is where one hides for a year. Fraud prevention is mostly identity discipline at the edges and reconciliation discipline in the middle – neither requires software, both require the habit.
If you want a second set of eyes
We build books for real estate operators where every dollar has a name attached and every account ties to the bank monthly – the same discipline that caught our impersonator. If your books could not currently tell you whether a fraudulent payment slipped through last quarter, that is worth a conversation: book a free discovery call.
Recent Comments