That’s when your world just falls apart.
[00:00:18] The why behind cybercrime in these networks, it, it’s becoming an ideology.
It adds so much texture to it unfortunately.
[00:00:39] Bob: Buying or selling a home is the biggest transaction many people ever engage in.
Most of us do it only a handful of times in life.
There’s a swirl of paperwork, small details, and big money.
There’s a lot of hurry up and wait, a lot of tension.
It’s the perfect recipe for a perfect scam.
All that money makes for a very large target.
It all adds up to a massive problem.
But behind every crime is a person.
A person who might have lost all of their life savings or even lost their home.
Let’s meet one of them.
[00:02:13] Paul spent a lot of his adult life caring for his aging mother.
He moved away from home to be with her.
[00:02:33] Paul: I was living up there, taking care of my mom.
My parents retired and moved up there.
And she just recently passed away, and, and so that’s the real reason I was leaving.
I thought, well I’ll go back home.
I really wasn’t wild about living there.
My mother was in a nursing home, and she was under Medicaid.
She had no money left to her name; it was all my savings.
[00:03:13] Bob: He found the perfect spot to start his new life.
Paul got an email back saying, that was a good idea.
[00:04:18] Bob: So he goes to the bank with those codes to wire the money.
All of the money.
He’s buying the home in cash.
There’s no loan.
It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Can we get it done?"
And she goes, “Sure.”
And she goes, “Oh yeah, I’ll just give them a shout.”
She called up and the line was busy.
I said, “Busy?
Who gets busy tones anymore?”
So she said, “The line’s busy.”
I said, “Busy?
How come it didn’t go to a voice mail or give you an option?”
She goes, “I don’t know, I’ll try it again.”
So she did it again, it was still busy.
[00:05:42] Paul: So I live like 10 minutes from the bank.
It showed that I had wired the money, you know, to the title company.
It was a done deal.
He goes, “What’s that?”
I go, “That’s a receipt.”
I go, “For all the information you gave me.”
The money has already been wired to the title company."
He goes, “What?”
And he says, “Where did you get that information?”
I said, “Off your email.”
And I sent him back his email, and he goes, “I never wrote that.”
[00:06:19] Bob: “I never wrote that.”
The words just crushed Paul.
[00:06:24] Paul: That’s when your world just falls apart.
I said, “What do you mean you never wrote that?”
He goes, “I never gave you any of that information.”
And I said, “Are you kidding me?
What’s that about?”
He goes, “I don’t know, but I never did.”
And I said, “Oh for God’s sakes, you’ve got to be kidding.”
He goes, “No, no,” he goes, “Well let’s check this.”
I go, “Look, I’m not checking on (beep) at this point.
I’m going to go back to the bank, I’ve got to stop that wire.”
I was flipping out.
[00:06:52] Bob: It was his whole life savings.
His whole new life.
And now, it seemed like everything was up in the air.
[00:07:19] Bob: He ran back to the bank immediately.
They go, “Oh my God, it couldn’t have been.”
I said, “It was.”
You know, I said, “All that information’s fake.”
And they go, “Well how did it get into your realtor’s email?”
I said, “I don’t know how it got in there.
Look, we’ve got to stop the wire.
We’ll get down to this stuff later.”
You know, I go, “Stop the wire.”
[00:07:39] Bob: The bank teller called the fraud department.
She was put on hold, then transferred, then on hold again and again.
No one seemed to know what to do.
It seemed hopeless, but just then, help arrived.
He called me, and he goes, “you gotta get home right away.”
And I’m thinking, “Who the hell is this guy?”
You know, and he goes, he says, “you better get home right away.”
I already gave him your phone number; he’s going to call you in about 10 minutes."
And I got home, and this guy called me.
And he said, “We’re on it, we’re working on it.”
I mean it was probably one of the worst days of my life other than losing a loved one.
I’m just like, you’ve got to be kidding me.
[00:08:43] Tom Cronkright: Yeah, I was in a meeting at the time.
How can I help?
I’m reading between the lines here."
But yeah, it’s a drop everything moment.
There’s no doubt about it.
[00:08:58] Bob: Tom had to drop everything.
So I got involved.
But he also owns a company named Certified, which specializes in preventing wire fraud.
And he has experience racing against the clock trying to recover funds that had just been misdirected by criminals.
It’s a personal quest for him.
He was a victim once.
That’s just what happened to Paul.
It wasn’t like it was an email three days later.
It was like, it was in response to, but it was a fairly quick response.
More reason to believe it’s legit.
Well his response back was something like, yeah, it sounds like a good idea.
And here’s all the information you need.
[00:11:56] Bob: It seems like the perfect crime.
And they know how to hide their tracks.
Like it truly didn’t exist.
He’s telling me I’ve got to move money.
[00:13:01] Bob: Realtors are particularly vulnerable because many of them are independent agents.
They often have to supply their own email accounts, or they want to use their own.
[00:13:27] Tom Cronkright: They have been.
I don’t want to single them out.
And that’s where a lot of them, unfortunately, don’t do it that way.
[00:14:49] Bob: Wire transfer criminals often show a lot of patience.
[00:15:01] Tom Cronkright: It’s essentially what happens.
And most often they’re in an email account between a week and a month.
Well that’s 20 other targets that that fraudster would have visibility to.
So that’s exactly what happened.
[00:15:51] Bob: Paul and, now, Tom, are in a race against time.
Remember it’s 4 pm.
The Fed cutoff, the time when banks settle their wire transfers for the day, is 5 pm.
After that, things would get a lot more complicated.
[00:16:32] Bob: Stopping a wire transfer is a true race against time.
[00:16:42] Tom Cronkright: A SWIFT recall is an industry term.
That’s the challenge.
[00:17:20] Bob: Wire transfers aren’t exactly instant.
Sometimes there are small delays, and in that case, it might work to Paul’s advantage.
[00:18:03] Bob: Criminals can’t send stolen wire transfers out of the country in one transaction.
That would raise too many alarm bells.
So, instead, they split them up into smaller lots of money, smaller transfers.
They also make several layers of transfers, Tom calls them hops, to avoid raising suspicion.
These hops provided Tom’s last chance to stop Paul’s money.
[00:18:25] Bob: I like metaphors that almost but don’t quite work.
That’s my specialty.
But I mean the money still has to move from one place to another place to another place.
So you’re exactly right.
So you alert the banks, get federal law enforcement involved.
[00:19:36] Bob: Meanwhile, Paul was pacing at home.
Tom had been in touch with Paul all along, and he sounded positive.
Then the sun came up on the next day, and his phone rang.
It was the bank.
Like it never happened, Paul’s ordeal lasted less than 24 hours.
He was able to close on his new home without delay.
He was also very lucky.
[00:20:18] Tom Cronkright: He was absolutely lucky.
But I’m glad he’s telling his story.
So yeah, most people unfortunately uh they either suffer a total or at least a pretty substantial loss.
[00:21:07] Bob: Diane Tomb is the Chief Executive Officer of The American Land Title Association.
[00:21:45] Bob: Millions of dollars.
[00:21:46] Diane Tomb: I know, I know, it’s crazy.
There was a couple in California that found their dream home.
A few days later, the mortgage company called asking where this wire transfer was.
The couple said they’d already had made the transfer.
The couple, thinking they were buying the house of their dreams, sent the criminals money directly.
But that’s not typical.
[00:23:08] Bob: And let’s talk about the scale of the problem broadly.
So I read somewhere that the crime was up 500% year over year.
Is, could that be possible?
[00:23:24] Bob: Diane stressed to me that this fraud can happen to anyone.
And we mean anyone.
But we had a real estate agent, who was buying a house himself.
This was a person who had been in the industry for 20 years, and it happened to them.
[00:23:54] Bob: Most consumers engage in only a handful of home sales in their lifetime.
So the process is almost always very new and very confusing.
Also, there is no one uniform way to conduct a home sale in the US.
Confusion always creates opportunity for criminals.
[00:24:11] Diane Tomb: It’s very complex.
There’s no really one way to do it.
There’s no moment when all parties are in a room, no physical closing.
That trend was really accelerated by the pandemic.
And that also creates an opening for criminals.
[00:25:31] Tom Cronkright: We’re doing some webinars with the Secret Service and other things nationally.
It has so much texture to it, unfortunately.
[00:25:55] Bob: In fact, Tom believes it’s a way of life, an ideology.
[00:26:52] Bob: It’s also a very profitable realm.
Two thousand, three thousand a year?
[00:27:17] Bob: New technology is making things even easier for the criminals providing new attack vectors.
[00:27:22] Tom Cronkright: The newest flavors of this are synthetic identity is a big one.
So they’ll purchase credentials on the Dark Web for an individual.
So think of it as my identity’s compromised.
And then when law enforcement goes to investigate or show up, it literally is a ghost.
Criminal gangs are even using artificial intelligence to finetune their crimes.
[00:28:36] Tom Cronkright: Well that’s what it would be.
The artificial intelligence is just that on user behavior.
And it’s just terrifying.
There’s no world where that’s good for any of us.
And consumer education is a big part of that.
[00:29:05] Tom Cronkright: Yeah, I mean it’s not all doom and gloom and peril.
We really focus on three things.
Uh, first is awareness and education.
Being aware, just like we’re doing right now, right.
Being aware that you or someone else in the transaction, their funds could be at risk.
I think that’s number one.
Second is you’ve got to verify identity.
Why not have this conversation in the first couple days?
How am I going to get the money to you, and what can I expect?
I mean pick up the phone, go to Google or, you know, look them up independently.
[00:32:01] Bob: Paul is safely in his new home now.
But the scars of his experience run deep.
And I couldn’t sleep in that house period.
I mean I just said I can’t go back in there.
And I put it for sale.
So that same kind of insecurity, like I feel like somebody’s out to get me.
Your life’s been violated, and it’s something you had no control over.
Yeah, you feel like someone took advantage of you, and it’s not right.
My world hasn’t really uh gotten solid since that.
I’m a real skeptic on a lot of things.
I was before, like I said.
But now it’s, it’s even worse.
I mean I was even kind of leery about this phone call from you.
[00:33:01] Bob: That’s okay, Paul.
It’s good to be skeptical even if you get a call from me.
Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
For AARP’s The Perfect Scam, I’m Bob Sullivan.
AARPs Fraud Watch data pipe can help you spot and avoid scams.
