A former real estate agent and her spouse had to use their retirement funds to purchase a home after falling victim to a scam that resulted in a loss of $63,000. This occurred when Laurie and Rich Ramelow relocated from California to Texas to be closer to their daughter.
Laurie, previously a real estate agent, and Rich, a project manager within a telecommunications company, discovered a seemingly ideal residence in San Antonio, spanning 1,901 square feet and comprising four bedrooms.
Upon accepting their offer, they received directives on a Friday in April regarding the wire transfer of escrow funds. On the subsequent Monday, the escrow officer contacted them requesting the remittance of the previously transferred funds.
A Costly Mistake: Scammed Out Of $63,000
"She called and said, 'Where's the money?" Laurie, 55, told Business Insider. "I said, 'What?'" It was then that the Ramelows realized that they had fallen victim to a fraudulent scheme. A criminal impersonating the Ramelows' escrow officer had tricked them into sending approximately $63,000.
"The timing was right, and the fraudster knew the address and all the parties involved," Laurie said. The Ramelows ultimately completed the purchase of their San Antonio home, but this achievement came at the expense of a substantial portion of their future financial security.
The pair expressed regret over feeling pressured to expedite the transaction, which they believed was unnecessary. Before falling victim to the scam, the Ramelows resided in a house in Simi Valley, California, close to Los Angeles.
Notably, they were not experiencing a pressing urgency to purchase a new home. The California home, also a four-bedroom residence exceeding 1,900 square feet in size, served as their primary dwelling for over thirty years after they acquired it from Rich's parents. The process of purchasing that home was different.
"It wasn't escrow with all these parties and everything transpiring," Rich, 55, told BI. "It was a quick and easy process with escrow because it was among family." The San Antonio acquisition represented the Ramelows' first independent home purchase.
Despite having no experience with wire transfers, they proceeded with the process upon receiving the instructions, acknowledging a sense of urgency from the counterparty. Nevertheless, they continued.
"There was an urgency to get escrow closed that day, which, for us, didn't really matter," Rich said. "We were buying it while we still had our house in California, so we shouldn't have fallen for being pressured into it. We should have just slowed down and taken our time."
"We were just trying to go with the flow and we didn't want to be the ones holding up escrow," Rich added. Even Laurie, who held the position of a real estate agent until 2017, had limited familiarity with the escrow process.
"I wasn't involved so much with escrow — escrow handled all that," she said. "I made sure they walked clients through and I never had that experience." Despite noticing a few grammatical errors in the email with the fraudulent wiring instructions, Laurie dismissed them as harmless since she hadn't previously communicated with the escrow officer.
Scammers Exploit Victims Who Ignore Warning Signs
According to Lisa Plaggemier, executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting cybersecurity awareness and education, the Ramelows' narrative aligns with a recurring pattern.
Plaggemier asserted that the Ramelows' situation mirrored instances she had encountered previously. "The telltale signs of the language being a little bit off and that sense of urgency," Plaggemier told BI. "Those are two consistent things that we see very often."
Minor discrepancies, such as the omission of the letter "s" in the designation "Regions Bank" within the escrow email, escaped detection by the bank teller. "I think that a lot of banks train their frontline staff to look for things like this," Plaggemier said.
"It sounds like obviously there was a missed opportunity there," she added. A Regions Bank spokesperson told BI over email: "While we will not discuss individual customer interactions out of respect for client privacy, we can confirm our bankers are trained to ask questions of anyone requesting a wire transfer and those questions are designed, in part, to help detect instances of fraud."
There have been multiple incidents where scammers trick innocent victims, who ignore telltale scam signs, into sending a large sum of money. Matthew Sweeney, a university student, for instance, lost $12,000 in a scam after clicking on a link in a message appearing to be from ANZ.
Similarly, a British engineering firm was defrauded in May by a sophisticated scam involving deepfake technology. An employee, deceived by a video call fabricated using artificial intelligence, inadvertently transferred HK$200 million (£20 million / $25 million) to criminal entities.
