Earlier this week, one of my clients almost lost $18,000 on this home buyer WIRE FRAUD scheme. I'm going to show you how he caught the scam and what you can do to prevent it from happening to you and your family. See how wire fraud is costing home buyers $1,000's. I'm going to show you 2 “wire fraud” emails that were sent to one of my clients. Here's how it happend.

Transcription

Hi everyone. This is your Tampa Bay realtor Lance Mohr and in this video, I’m just going to get right to it because this involves wire fraud. I had some wire fraud that happened to a client of mine a few days ago and it was really elaborate. It was pretty high tech and to the degree that they went to do this, I just haven’t really heard of it before. So I wanted to bring this up to you because I know a lot of home buyers out there are going to probably be losing a lot of money dues to this because it just looks real. So I’m going to go over that and I’m going to do a screenshot video showing you the email so you get an idea of what was sent to look out for this.

Now, I just want to say before I get into that if you are buying a home and you wire money somewhere always verify where you’re wiring the money. If you’re getting the wiring with instructions from an attorney or a title company it should be encrypted. So, in other words, it just shouldn’t be an email or as a PDF instruction or a word attachment. If you see this run for the hills. Always call up whoever sent it to you or wherever the money supposed to be going. Say a title company and verify this with them. If it’s a builder sometimes the Builder reps will actually hand out writing instructions for their title company or for wherever it’s supposed to go. So you just want to make sure that you check everything out. If it seems a little suspicious always take caution and always go ahead and make sure and verify that you’re sending it to the right place and then when we get done with the end of the video I’m going to give you a little tip and what I do how to protect what I have so this doesn’t really happen to me.

Anyhow, so let’s just jump right into it and here’s the screenshot of the emails. Okay so here’s the email and what ended up happening. I had my buyer get this email and he contacted me and I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about so I picked up the phone called him and he was explaining to me how I sent him an email to wire the money and I asked him to send the emails to me so this is the first email and then what happened when it came over to him. It only said the form and only how to Lance Mohr here. It didn’t have this whatever email this is that they use as Comcast.net right here. So it only had Lance Mohr in it basically just said good morning. You can see it’s not personalized. The $18,000 should be wired to the title company’s commercial trust account. I will send you the instructions once you would know its receipt of this email by replying and then it says I have I’m busy and I have limited access to my phone. So can you send me an email because they obviously didn’t want him to pick up the phone and call me and then they put thanks Lance Mohr, Keller Williams and then my license number, my broker number? So obviously that is a little weird right there because that isn’t how any of my signatures go. Now, this was the first email right here. So this is the second email it came over it has the property address on it. Looks like it’s coming from me. This one came over about 15 minutes later in the morning and it said to see the wiring instructions below. You know it told him to wire the money to Chase Bank in Pasadena California, gave the routing number.

Now here’s this where I knew something was really weird going on with this. He recognized it when he saw the Pasadena but this was a Lennar Homes that the buyer was buying and if you look at the account name in the beginning and at the end it has the beginning say Eagle and at the end says mortgage. So they know when Lennar’s Mortgage Company is Eagle Mortgage. Now there are three ways it could happen it could have, someone could have hacked into my computer and got to my email and saw everything going on with myself with the buyer with Lennar and everything but it went into my email. I only use my laptop computer at home and work and I have a Virtual Private Network. So unless they’re getting through military-grade encryption it’s not my computer. The second option would have been Lennar. I highly doubt it was Lennar and I talked this over with Lennar rep just because of the protocol that they’ll have on their computers in their office. The buyers don’t have a computer at home. If he needs to use one he’ll use his neighbors but he has a mobile device and I think that’s where it happened. I think what happened is someone hacked into his mobile device. Got into his email and started looking over everything.

This is really scary. You know again thank goodness he had the whereabouts in the sense to pick up the phone and call me. He also picked up the phone and called the builder rep and talked to her and she’s like no I have no idea why Lance would send that. Then I talked to him. When I talked to him and I asked him to send me this. You know obviously, it’s not me right away. It gave some junk email address at Comcast.net. I knew when he forwarded to me it would say the email. I did tell him should send this to the FBI because it’s basically a federal issue. Wire fraud they are trying to get his money.

The one thing that I would I recommended to him and I have it on my computer and I recommended it to a lot of people is to get what I have. It’s a virtual Private network. It’s a VPN, there’s a lot of companies out there you know and what this ode and you can read it up on it. Watch YouTube videos on it but it basically shields you from someone wanting to get into your computer, to get your information. It basically encrypts everything with military grade encryption. It’s really tough if someone would be able to try to crack it. So I don’t personally use my phone for business much other than calling and has called some pictures, some videos but I don’t email on my phone or save any accounts or anything for this reason. If I did I would get a virtual private network on my phone as well but I don’t.

So I hope that helped you. Again I’m not here pitch I haven’t you get a VPN. I just think it’s a really good and safe thing to get. I would definitely do it you know, there’s just a lot of wire fraud going on right now. A lot of its just spam email where they just sending out hundreds of thousands of emails hoping they catch someone who’s buying a home. I would just ask you favor if you can and if anybody that you that’s looking at buying a home send them this video because you don’t want them to get taken to the bank and there have been people out in Tampa area that had been on the news that has been out $51,000 dollars due to wire fraud and I certainly don’t want that to happen to you. I don’t want it to happen to anybody you know, family, friends, co-workers, anybody. So anybody looking to buy a home, share this with them please if you have any questions about that don’t hesitate to give me a call. Have a wonderful day. Thank you.

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