Listen here
Watch here
This National Association of Realtors article that says “High-tech criminals are using artificial intelligence to impersonate the real estate pros and infiltrate transactions.”
Would your clients know the difference?”
As Nationwide Fraud Losses Top $10 Billion in 2023, FTC Steps Up Efforts to Protect the Public
Checklist for buyers to protect from deepfake scams
- Don’t trust anything from emails, incoming calls, messages or zoom calls from all parties involved, including your realtor, loan officer and escrow officer. Scammers can fake your realtor’s voice, face and Zoom call now.
- Only use printed bank routing information picked up from the escrow office
- Don’t use any sensitive personal financial information on emails, text, etc.
Checklist for vacant lot owners and out of state owners.
- Setup Google alert for your property address: this can alert you if your property gets listed by a realtor or a fake realtor.
- Check with your property county to see if any alert systems are available when any deed recording requests are being made.
So here are some of things that I do with my clients, especially the buyer clients who need to send the down payment or earn this money into escrow.
I tell them “if you see an email from me talking about wiring instruction, you need to let me know and report that because as a real estate agent, I will not ever ever ever send banking information to you or anyone else because I don’t want to be the weak link to jeopardize my client’s hard -saved money and I guess scamming emails and messages pretty much every day I know that I’m a target so I would not get involved in any of wiring information.”
What I tell my buyer is that “when you go to the escrow office to deposit your earnest money check to the escrow office just to pick up the wiring information printed out from the office and don’t ever trust anything email even secure email link.”
I don’t know if I can trust anymore.
No matter how much of the AI world develops. Face to face, you cannot fake. For the buyers out there, for any kind of small business people out there, if you don’t know where you’re sending your money to, you better not send it at all. I’ve actually heard from this story from a Realtors Networking Group. Some agents actually took the vacant lot listings.
They marked them, they found the buyers, they went under contract and they closed on those. After closings are done, the real owners of that lots may find out or may not find out,
but they lost the ownership of the vacant lots. It’s because the listing agents took the listings from the fake sellers and real buyers bought them and transferred the ownership to the real buyers. The real sellers may not even know it, because we see this a lot of times that the vacant listings, nobody knows who owns what.
If you’re a vacant lot owner or investor owning some properties that you don’t get to visit all the time that you don’t live in, you may want to check on your deeds every once in a while. If you stop receiving your tax payment, that could be the flags that you need to call the county and see if you still own that property or not.
I think meeting might be the only way to deal with this. I mean, I don’t know how else we can vet this deep fake scammers.
I’m going to be digesting this and I’m gonna put a lot more weight on face-to-face and handshakes, really educating my clients of these potential scammer attacks.
Thanks for watching and hearing me kind of venting or concerned, actually I’m a little bit freaked out about this. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe and share with your friends and other people who do businesses.
Have a great day and be safe!
Shawn Realty 