In the wake of the recent closures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank, CertifID and our customers have received an influx of requests to update mortgage servicer wiring instructions and banking relationships. These requests, while often legitimate, create a serious payments risk. 

In times of disruption, whether in the midst of a pandemic or following a bank run, fraud operators accelerate their attacks to take advantage of the chaos. Their objective is to find ways to misdirect mortgage payoffs and other payments into a controlled account. Most often the method used to steal these payments is business email compromise (BEC) – i.e., spoofed emails used to socially engineer victims into changing payment details. 

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According to the FBI, BEC continued to grow last year to $2.7B, or 26%, of all victim losses in 2022¹. These and a number of findings were just made available by the FBI and you can see the highlights in this recently published infographic. 

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For any banking change request that you receive, look out for immediate red flags, including: 

• Any payment information in the form of email
• Requests that feature a link to change payment information (that could be directing users to a spoofed website or malware) 
• Requests that are marked or written as ‘urgent’ 
• Requests that seem to come from a company’s top management, especially emails or text messages supposedly from the CEO or CFO 

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To truly protect yourself, you need to be able to validate wiring instructions independently and securely. This is best done through a wire fraud protection service.

To help our customers and others in the real estate community, CertifID has issued emergency access to PayoffProtect to enable any firm to quickly and easily validate the authenticity of wiring instructions.

Here’s how it works: 

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Covering over 95% of all payoffs including the nation’s primary lenders, CertifID’s PayoffProtect is used by real estate firms across the country. In fact, since PayoffProtect launched last year, CertifID has verified over 32K payoff transactions and caught millions in wire fraud on behalf of our customers. 

You can sign up today and protect your payments at no cost until March 31, 2023. 

Click here to get emergency access to PayoffProtect. 
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Citations: 

Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Internet Crime Report” 2022 (Reference link here)