Frontier Title has a reputation of trust and strong customer service across Texas. They teamed up with CertifID to ensure the safety of their clients and business.
Frontier Title has a reputation of trust and strong customer service across Texas. They teamed up with CertifID to ensure the safety of their clients and business.
Frontier Title has a reputation of trust and strong customer service across Texas. They teamed up with CertifID to ensure the safety of their clients and business.
Title Company
Frontier Title
Leslie Work, Executive Vice President of Escrow Services at Frontier Title, remembers the day in February 2015 like it was yesterday. That was when, in Work’s words, “wire fraud introduced itself to me.”
From that day forward, Frontier Title knew it had to change how it handled wire fraud to maintain a long-held reputation of trust and strong customer service across Texas.
CertifID had the chance to sit down with Work to learn more about her and Frontier Title’s experience with wire fraud.
“We call it the ‘late switch-a-roo,’” explains Work of her experience helping a seller through the final stages of closing. After her client decided to complete the wiring instructions manually at their local bank, Work received an urgent email from the seller’s real estate agent the next morning.
Due to “technical difficulties,” the email claimed that the seller’s chosen destination for the wire transfer of the sales proceeds would have to be directed to a different account held by the seller.
After exchanging several emails and feeling the pressure to move forward, Work decided to trust her instincts that something wasn’t right. “It didn’t sit well with me because the seller was older, didn’t have her account information on her, and now all of a sudden wanted to send it to a business account,” recalled Work.
Work decided to do some investigating. She contacted the seller’s real estate agent—the supposed source of the emails—and they determined that Work had caught a wire fraud attempt in action, facilitated by business email compromise.
The cybercriminal was never identified, but Work’s instincts and professionalism prevented the customer’s funds from being stolen.
Up until that time, Work and the team at Frontier TItle were aware and mindful of the risk of wire fraud, but they had not been directly affected by it. However, this instance set into motion a series of decisions and actions that Frontier made to address the growing risk of wire fraud.
After reaching out to peers and conducting their own research, Frontier Title learned about CertifID from an underwriter partner in their network and decided to get a demo of their wire fraud prevention platform.
Work notes, “From there, it was just the ease of working with [CertifID] team, the support that we were given, and the peace of mind to be able to send out wiring instructions and receive account information that was protected.”
Integrating CertifID was also easy. “Everyone was already onboard, honestly, because everyone was scared with what we were seeing,” recalls Work.
In addition to implementing CertifID into their workflow, Frontier Title then began to leverage CertifID’s PayoffProtect and tap into other wire fraud prevention best practices.
Frontier Title knew that mortgage payoff fraud was becoming increasingly common, with huge transactions at stake. Fraudsters were getting better at intercepting and impersonating lender communications during a payoff process. That’s why the team implemented PayoffProtect as soon as it became available.
CertifID recently worked with Work’s team to identify and stop an attempted fraud in real-time, involving a Mr. Cooper payoff case. Said Work: “the solution saved the funds from being stolen, and saved the team a huge headache to the tune of $156k.”
Work also recognizes the value of “buyer beware” communications. “[Fraudsters] are getting in touch with customers before [Frontier Title] is even a party to a contract,” said Work. “And they go back and forth so [customers] can send their money to the fraudulent account.”
That’s why Work encourages settlement and title companies to be the first to get information out to incoming customers. Companies should prioritize educating their staff, real estate agent partners, and home buyers and sellers about the risks and warning signs of fraud. “If we can educate our real agent partners to know what to look for, they can help us.”
If Work can pass on a final word to other real estate professionals looking to fight back, it would be this: “If you haven’t picked a provider to send and receive wiring instructions and protect payoff information, I would advise you to look into something immediately because wire fraud is so prevalent, and we are seeing so many different scenarios and ways they are coming up with to divert money.”
Set up a meeting with the CertifID team, so your organization can experience the peace of mind that Frontier Title and others have found.