Last reviewed: July 2026
The threat
Criminals compromise or convincingly imitate email accounts involved in real estate transactions and send fraudulent wiring instructions — often days before closing, often 'correcting' or 'updating' legitimate instructions, and often from an address one character away from a real one. Wired funds move fast and recovery windows are short. Buyers' cash-to-close and sellers' proceeds are both targets.
Our standing rules
- We deliver wiring instructions through secure channels and confirm them verbally.
- Our wiring instructions DO NOT CHANGE during a transaction. Any message saying otherwise is an attack.
- We never accept or act on instruction changes received by email or text alone.
- We verify disbursement instructions by callback to independently confirmed numbers.
Your checklist before sending any wire
- Call us at 954.454.4522 — a number you obtained from this website or your title commitment, never from the email in question — and verbally confirm every digit of the instructions.
- Confirm the receiving bank name, account name, and account number match what we read to you.
- Be suspicious of urgency: 'wire in the next hour or lose the deal' is attacker language.
- Send a test-amount confirmation with your bank if available, and ask us to confirm receipt.
If you suspect you wired to a fraudulent account
Act in minutes, not days: (1) call your bank's fraud department and request a wire recall and account freeze; (2) call us; (3) file a complaint at the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (ic3.gov) and ask your bank about the Financial Fraud Kill Chain for wires over $50,000; (4) preserve all emails, including full headers. Recovery odds fall by the hour — speed is everything.