Protecting your money from wire fraud

What wire fraud is

In a real estate closing, wire fraud usually means a criminal tricks you into sending money, a deposit or your closing funds, to an account that isn’t the one you intended. The most common version is business email compromise. A scammer breaks into an email account belonging to your agent, title company or lender, or builds a convincing fake of one. Right around the moment a wire is expected, they send new instructions with a different account and routing number.

Once a wire goes out, it’s gone. There’s no reversing it the way you can dispute a check or a credit card charge.

Anyone can be a target

Careful people lose money to this every year. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 12,368 real estate fraud complaints in 2025, with losses over $275 million, and buyers, sellers, attorneys and agents have all been on the receiving end. These scams work because they’re timed to a transaction you’re already expecting, at the exact moment you’re expecting it. That timing is the whole trick.

Slowing down stops it

The habit that defeats wire fraud is simple and repeatable: slow down, and verify before you send anything. A scammer’s whole plan depends on urgency and borrowed trust. One extra step, confirming instructions through a channel the scammer doesn’t control, breaks that plan every time.

Common ways it happens

• Email spoofing. A message dressed up to look like it came from me, your lender or the title company, sometimes sent from a domain that’s off by a single letter.
• Phishing. A link or attachment built to steal your email password, often disguised as a document to review, a delivery notice or an e-sign request. Buyers and sellers are often the real target here. A scammer inside your inbox can read your real email about the deal, learn your closing date and the amount you’re expecting to send, then time a fake wire instruction to land at exactly the right moment.
• Smishing (text scams). The same trick by text message, often framed as a quick, urgent update to a payment detail or a phone number.
• Vishing (phone scams). A phone call from someone posing as your lender, the title agent or me, asking you to confirm account details or act on new instructions on the spot.
• Compromised inboxes. A scammer gets real access to an email account, an agent’s, an attorney’s, a title company’s or your own, and quietly watches a transaction before striking. A strong unique password and two-factor authentication on your own email matter as much during a transaction as checking who’s writing to you.

Email isn’t always the best option

Email is reliable, which is why everyone still uses it and why most of this fraud lives there. Reliability and security are different things. A standard email travels unencrypted, a sender’s display name is trivial to fake, and a scammer who gets into a real inbox can sit quietly and watch a deal for weeks. Those limits are built into how email works.

Better options exist for sharing documents and details involved in a transaction. I use privacy and security-focused platforms for document sharing, signing and communication during a deal. They verify identity and encrypt information in transit, and they close off most of the ways sensitive details leak.

The money itself needs the same protection. Work only with services that send wire instructions and collect funds through a secure, purpose-built app. If a title or escrow service can only handle wire details over email, that alone is a reason to look elsewhere.

How to verify a message is real

• Check the full email address rather than the display name alone. Compare it letter by letter against the address you have for me. Look for swapped letters, extra characters or a domain that’s almost right.
• Hover over any link before you click it and check where it leads.
• I will never send wire instructions by email. Not as a first message and not as a “correction.”
• I will never ask for sensitive personal or financial information, account numbers, Social Security numbers or login credentials, by email or text.
• Wire instructions are confirmed by phone, on a number you already have on file, and they don’t change casually or on short notice. Ever.
• If instructions arrive that appear to come from me, your lender or the title company asking you to wire funds or update banking details, stop. Call to confirm on a number you’ve verified yourself, never one supplied in the message.

If a wire already went out

Call your bank’s wire department immediately and ask them to attempt a recall, then file a complaint at ic3.gov. Banks and the FBI can sometimes freeze funds, and the odds fall by the hour, so make those two calls before anything else, including one to me.