Wire Fraud in Real Estate Is Real. Here Is What You Need to Know Before Closing Day

At some point near the end of every real estate transaction, a large sum of money moves by wire. That moment is when wire fraud happens.

I am not writing this post to make buying a home feel more complicated than it already is. I am writing it because first time buyers are three times more likely to fall victim to wire fraud than experienced buyers, and the reason is almost never carelessness. It is simply that nobody told them to pay attention.

Now you know, and that puts you ahead of thousands of buyers who lost money they never had to lose. Read this once, understand it, and carry it with you to closing day.

What Wire Fraud in Real Estate Actually Looks Like

Wire fraud stopped looking like obvious scams a long time ago. What arrives now is a professional, well-formatted email that appears to come from your title company, your closing attorney, or sometimes your real estate agent, complete with the right logo, the right tone, and wiring instructions telling you exactly where to send your closing funds.

The instructions are wrong. The account belongs to a criminal.

This works because criminals are patient. They gain access to an email account somewhere in the transaction chain and monitor it quietly for weeks, learning the names of everyone involved, the timeline, and the amounts. Then, at precisely the moment when wire instructions would naturally arrive, they either send their own fraudulent version first or they intercept a legitimate email and replace the attachment with a document containing different account numbers before it reaches you.

That last version is the one that catches even careful people. The email is real. The sender is real. The only thing that changed is what is inside the attachment, and no amount of careful reading of the email itself would catch it.

The FBI logged $275 million in real estate wire fraud losses in 2025, up from $173 million the year before. These are not unusual targets or elaborate schemes. They are ordinary buyers in ordinary transactions who acted on written instructions without one additional step that would have caught everything.

What This Means for Our Transaction Specifically

Here is what I tell every buyer I work with. I will never send you wire instructions and I will never be part of any email regarding where to wire your money. That is not my role. The only party who will send you legitimate wiring instructions is the closing agent, meaning the title company or closing attorney handling your transaction.

When you receive any email regarding wire instructions, before you open the attachment or act on anything in that message, pick up the phone and call the closing agent directly using a number you have on file from earlier in the transaction, not a number provided anywhere in the email you just received. Ask them to confirm the receiving bank name and the account number verbally and compare what they told you to what is printed on the page. If those numbers match exactly, you are good. If anything is off, even a single digit, stop and tell them immediately.

That phone call is what catches the fraud that no amount of visual inspection would find. The email may look completely legitimate because in some cases it is a real email from a real account with only the attachment swapped. The numbers are the tell, and the only way to check the numbers is to hear them from a real person and compare.

The One Thing Worth Remembering

Never initiate a wire transfer based on instructions received by email alone. Call the closing agent using a number you have independently verified, ask them to confirm the bank name and account number out loud, match what you hear to what the document says, and only then move forward. A legitimate closing agent will never be bothered by that call. The two minutes it takes is the protection built into the process, and it is yours to use every single time.Yes, I wrote this twice. It’s worth the second read.

You Are More Prepared Than Most Buyers Ever Are

Most buyers learn about wire fraud after it touches someone they know, or after they read a news story, or in the worst cases after it happens to them. You are reading this before any of that. You know how it works, you know what my role is and is not, and you know exactly what to do when wire instructions arrive.

That is the whole point of this series. The information is not secret. It just rarely gets handed to buyers at the right moment. You have it now. You are armed, you are protected, and you are ready. Go buy a house.

FAQ

Q: How do I know if a wire fraud email is fake if it looks so convincing?

A: In many cases you cannot tell just by looking at it, and that is precisely the point. The protection is not visual inspection of the email. It is a phone call to the closing agent where you confirm the bank name and account number verbally before you act on anything. That call is what catches the fraud that careful reading alone would miss.

Q: Will my closing agent send me wire instructions by email?

A: Your closing agent will communicate wiring instructions in writing at some point, and that is completely normal. The question is not whether you receive written instructions. The question is whether you confirm those instructions by phone before acting on them, specifically confirming the bank name and account number match what the closing agent has on their end. Written instructions plus a verbal confirmation of the number is what keeps you protected.

Q: What if I receive a phone call instead of an email asking me to wire money?

A: End the call, then call the closing agent back at a number you have on file from earlier in the transaction, not the number that just called you. Fraudsters sometimes call posing as closing agents or lenders, and the only way to confirm you are speaking with the right person is to initiate the call yourself through a channel you control.

Q: Is there anything I can do to reduce the risk on my end?

A: The most practical thing is to establish your closing agent's direct contact information early in the transaction and keep it somewhere outside your email inbox, in your phone contacts or written down somewhere accessible. Use that number, not any contact information provided in a message you receive, when it is time to verify. Give yourself permission to slow down near closing. The excitement of being almost finished is real, and it is also exactly the moment when an extra two minutes on the phone is worth more than you can imagine.