Wire-fraud safety check
Before you wire closing money, check the domain behind your wiring instructions for missing spoofing protection, a brand-new registration, and live lookalike spellings.
Confirm wiring instructions by phone before you send anything, using a number you already trust from your contract, your agent, or the office you visited. Never call a number printed in the wiring email itself, because if the email is fake, that number is too. Real title companies expect this call. And if instructions change at the last minute, treat the change as fraud until a person you know confirms it by voice.
- The wiring instructions changed at the last minute, especially the bank name or the account number.
- The message pushes urgency and says the closing will fall through unless you wire today.
- The reply-to address is different from the sender address, or the domain is spelled slightly differently than earlier emails in the thread.
- The tone, signature, or timing feels different from every other message the office has sent you.
- You are asked to keep the wire confidential or discouraged from calling the office to confirm.
Act in the first hours. Call your bank's fraud line immediately and ask it to recall the wire and contact the receiving bank. Then file a complaint at ic3.gov, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, which can activate its Recovery Asset Team on domestic wires. Tell your closing office and your agent as well. Recovery is genuinely possible when it starts fast and rare when it starts days later.
This tool reads public DNS and domain registration records in your browser and explains what they mean. It cannot see your email and it cannot tell you whether a specific message is genuine, so a page of good signs is never permission to skip the phone call. The one reliable protection is confirming wiring instructions by voice on a number you already trust, never one taken from the email itself. This is education, not security, legal, or financial advice.
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