A big client needed a wire sent to a seller in Southern Illinois. The seller kept failing the CertifID verification. The pressure to just push it through was real. Candise Grossi held the line anyway. 

When Premier Title finally tracked down the real seller — an over-the-road truck driver — his response was immediate: "I never called you. Wasn't me." His email had been hacked. Someone had been watching the transaction the entire time, posing as the seller, demanding a wire for hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

"So we saved a deal. We saved a couple of hundred thousand dollars. And we saved a relationship with a client,” she recalls.

“CertifID paid for itself a million times over.” 

Candise is the Director of National Escrow Services at Premier Title, which is based in Chicago and operates in nine states, mainly in the Midwest and Florida.

She has watched the industry change from having no technology to having too much. She noticed the rise in fraud before many of her peers did. "I could feel the stress of my staff. I needed to protect our title company. I needed to protect our staff."

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What manual verification was actually costing them

Before CertifID, the process was exactly what you'd expect — labor-intensive, time-consuming, and still not reliable enough to feel safe. Candise's team would independently search for phone numbers, call to verify wire instructions, and sometimes have two separate staff members run the same verification just to reduce the risk of human error. "I can't tell you the amount of hours that my staff spent, I still wasn't comfortable.”

All of that time came at a cost. Customers weren't getting the service they deserved because the team was too busy chasing verifications. 

"We were running around like a hamster in a wheel trying to verify stuff that CertifID could just do for us."

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A competitive edge in an attorney-driven market

Premier Title operates in Illinois, which means attorneys are at the center of almost every transaction. That created its own education challenge of getting lawyers to move away from paper forms and into a verified digital process. 

But CertifID gave Candise something real to offer. Wire instructions go directly to clients' phones, bypassing email entirely. That detail matters more than it might seem. Enough attorneys in the market had already been pulled into lawsuits because someone in a transaction chain forwarded wire instructions the wrong way. 

"The number one thing for the lawyers that they love is the wire instructions directly to their clients' enough of them have finally been involved in situations that they were brought into lawsuits."

Candise believes CertifID is more than a security feature; she uses it to win business. "I have something to offer them that someone else does not have to offer them, and that's CertifID."

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The scams that slip through without ID verification

CertifID Match verification has stopped two vacant-land scams cold for Candise and her team. Both were caught after a realtor had already signed a listing agreement, listed the property, and gone through the entire sale process. By the time the transaction reached Match, the fraud had been running for a month.

Match has been crucial, especially since she isn't optimistic that the problem will slow down. "It's such an easy scam to be perpetrated remotely. It's just right for the picking right now. And I don't think it's going to get any better.”

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The payoff risk most companies don't see coming

Payoff fraud operates on a different timeline than most wire fraud and that's what makes it so dangerous. 

"With payoff fraud, you could send a payoff and not hear that it wasn't received for 30 days. Sometimes you don't get that phone call until the seller is calling and saying, ‘hey, I have a late fee on my mortgage that could be catastrophic to a title company.’ You could close your doors down, quite honestly."

Payoff Protect removed that risk from the equation entirely.

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It's not a matter of if. It's when.

Candise doesn't soften it. "It's not a matter of if, but when you're going to get hit by a fraud. That the human link is the weakest link, and CertifID is a very small investment for the return."

And for the firms that haven't experienced a loss yet, she has a different angle: CertifID isn't just protection. It's a way to stand out with every partner you work with. 

"[CertifID] is a great tool that you can put out to your realtor partners, your attorney partners, your lender partners... to say we're out here to protect you."

That's worth it even if the fraud never comes. But Candise knows it will.

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