the stereotypical Nigerian prince emails
that are riddled with grammar, spelling
and syntax errors. “The scammers know
exactly what to say in an email and
the most effective canned responses to
any questions the buyer might have,”
Siciliano says. Plus, there’s the fact that
once executed, wire fraud is nearly
impossible to reverse. “You have to catch
it within hours,” Benda says. “A wire is
just like cash.”
To keep your deposits and down
payments safe, there are critical steps
you can take, including: always calling
a known phone number to verify wiring
instructions, and adding multi-factor
authentication to your email. These
scams are trickier to detect than you’d
think. So, was Jones scammed be-
cause she was unprepared? No. After
receiving the wiring instructions email,
Jones did the right thing; she called the
escrow agent to verify the email was
legitimate. The escrow agent confirmed
that she had just emailed wiring
instructions. So, thinking she was in the
clear, Jones wired the funds from her
brokerage account to what she thought
was the escrow company’s account at a
major bank.
What Jones didn’t do, however, still
haunts her. “I didn’t confirm the account
number.” The scammer, who had gained
access to Jones’ email account, had
intercepted and deleted the actual wiring
instructions email from Jones’ escrow
agent. He then substituted his own
email purporting to be from the escrow
agent that directed the funds to be sent
to the same bank, but to a different
account number. “The email was exactly
like the [deleted] email that came from
the escrow officer,” says Jones. “All
the scammer changed was the account
number and the bank’s address. There
wasn’t even a trace of them being inside
my email. They covered their tracks
very well.” Jones had expected her wired
funds to clear in the escrow company’s
account by the end of that day. On day
two, Jones called the escrow agent and
learned the money never arrived in the
designated account. Jones and her es-
crow agent compared account numbers
and realized the wired funds went
instead to a recently opened, different
account at the same bank.
A 10-minute phone call
could prevent you from
losing your life savings.
Even though the incident was
caught and reported quickly, fraud
investigations take time. Getting the
money back was a long shot. On
day three, Jones called her brokerage
account representative’s assistant to see
if she could get the wired money back
and got a strange response from the
assistant. “I told the assistant, ‘There’s
been a problem. The wired funds never
got there,’” Jones says. “The assistant
responded, ‘Then why are you emailing
asking for more money?’”
The scammer had been posing
as Jones and emailing the brokerage
assistant from Jones’ account, asking
for even more money to be wired to
the bogus account. Then to cover their
tracks, the scammer had deleted their
emails from Jones’ sent email folder.
Thankfully, the increasingly suspicious
brokerage assistant took all the correct
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
FALL/HOLIDAY 2019
precautions: she wrote back explaining
she couldn’t send more money based
solely on email instructions and insisted
on speaking to Jones or her husband.
The scammer also deleted those emails
and, posing as Jones, responded via
email and made excuses to the broker-
age assistant for why Jones and her
husband were not available to talk.
While this exchange was taking place,
the receiving bank reviewed the fraud
report and froze the scammer’s account,
which still had Jones’ $183,000 in it.
In these scams, fraudsters normally
bounce the money out of the accounts
as quickly as possible so the funds can’t
be frozen or sent back to the recipient.
But this scammer had waited to transfer
funds out of the account in hopes of
getting even more money out of Jones.
That greed is what saved Jones in the
end. Her transaction was delayed two
weeks; but otherwise, no harm done.
But as Jones found out, even a scam
where the victim gets the money back
can be disruptive in terms of time, stress
and money lost. Don’t assume this won’t
happen to you; act as though your
email is already compromised and make
decisions accordingly. Verify wiring
instructions and account numbers in
person or by calling a known number.
A 10-minute phone call could prevent
you from losing your life savings.
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