If you’re not careful, you could seriously get taken advantage of when buying or selling a home. Here are a few common scams that you should definitely watch out for.
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Today we’re going to talk about a few different real estate scams we’ve been keeping our eye on lately and how you can avoid them.
The first type of scam we tend to see is a wiring scam. When you’re wiring information to a title company, whether it’s your earnest money, your title deposit, or something else, you need to be very leery of suspicious emails.
We are seeing people hack the emails of agents and closing officers and posing as them. They provide their own wiring instructions and as soon as the money hits their account, it’s gone and you won’t ever get it back.
One way to prevent this is to always call the person who sends you wiring instructions. If they say yes, you’re good to go. If they don’t, you know you’re getting scammed. You should be verifying any suspicious emails, especially those asking you to send money.
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Anytime you get sent wiring instructions, confirm them with the sender by phone.
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Another scam we’ve been seeing has to do with scammers taking your property’s address and listing it for sale or for rent online. Somebody will find a home for sale, put it on Craigslist for rent, and collect a security deposit from a prospective “tenant.” You can put your address in Google Alerts to make sure you’re made aware of anybody trying to use your property in this type of scam.
These are just a few of the scams we’ve been seeing that we wanted to make you aware of. If you have any questions about these or anything else related to real estate in the meantime, don’t hesitate to give me a call or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you soon.