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No one wants to fall prey to scam artists. Better guidance from real estate agents would be a big help. After all, a staggering fifth of fraudulent money transfer requests pretend to be coming from real estate professionals.
So, why aren’t clients getting stronger warnings?
Continue reading “Say the F Word: Real Estate Agents Need to Warn Us About Fraud”
Real estate transactions involve large money transfers. Creative swindlers love those. And now, progress in artificial intelligence (AI) brings new opportunities for real estate fraud.
Shady actors are using real people’s voice or image samples to create recordings and persuade buyers and sellers to respond to questions with key information. Then the scammers hijack the target’s accounts. That’s right. A new breed of AI-powered wire fraud can manipulate familiar voices and grab online pictures to create whole recordings — just to get at people’s funds.
Remaining in the dark is not an option. To keep transactions safe, what do we need to know?
Continue reading “Now It’s the Deepfakes. Protect Deeds and Accounts From AI-Generated Imposters”
Remember that Halloween cyberattack on Mr. Cooper? Hackers got customers’ names and birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and phone numbers. They even got access to people’s banking details.
Some customers — new and longtime — tried to log in and could not access their accounts. They could not make payments. Even worse, the breach derailed some home buyers’ closing days.
Some people just recently received letters about the breach, and realized that the Mr. Cooper Group must have touched their mortgages at some point. Some of the exposed customer information came from households financed or serviced by Nationstar Mortgage — Mr. Cooper’s previous name. Their past information was still stored in the system. According toTechCrunch, nearly 14.7 million people had their data stolen.
But there’s more. Mr. Cooper wasn’t the only mortgage firm dealing with security breaches.
A spate of recent cyberattacks hit three more big mortgage and title companies: National Financial (FNF®), First American Financial, and loanDepot®. All in the past four months. The fallout is ongoing.
Continue reading “The Hacks Keep Coming: Private Customer Data Exposed at Four Major Mortgage Companies”