Closed on a house this past Tuesday. The previous Thursday we get an email from someone pretending to be the closing lawyer asking us to wire them the closing money - which obviously is a pretty significant chunk of change. The email was super legit looking. Had my name, wife's name, the address, had a fake version of our realtor's email in the CC, had the lawyer's letterhead, and the name of the employee at the lawyer we've been dealing with. They knew close to the actual amount, and the bank they wanted the money wired to was in the city of the lawyer's office. I can totally understand how someone could fall for it. My wife even responded to the first email with something like "Ok, give us the a bank info and final amount.". I caught it there and nothing was wired. They ended up trying again this Monday with the same series of e-mails. Stay safe out there everyone.
Edit: The red flag for me was the faked realtor email address in the CC of the scam email. Instead of "johndoe@yournewhouse.com" it was "johndoe_yournewhouse@fake.com". It came up as just JOHN in the email header, and I actually would not have seen it if I hadn't clicked on and expanded the addresses in the email.
Submitted May 03, 2019 at 04:01PM by krokislegend http://bit.ly/2IXocSL
