I have first hand knowledge on real estate wire fraud. Title companies are getting absolutely hammered on this. Someone spoofs the email of a party in the transaction and it's off to the races. The title company, the realtors, and the parties to the contract are all typically very tech illiterate, first off. Hats off to the IT people at a title company because they have to put up with so much bullshit. Secondly, the breaches are most likely coming from the realtor side. The IT people in title companies are very quick in detecting breaches and everything now is moving to remote systems where the network environment is closed off to everything except email and email has so many filters that sometimes confirmation of receipt of emails has to be phoned in because there was no space after a period and the filter read it as an unauthorized website. A realtor goes to a Starbucks, a bar, or a restaurant with free wifi. They go there so often that they automatically connect to the free wifi every time. The data sent over that free wifi can be intercepted by anyone. It makes too much sense that someone could sit in the parking lot and start sniffing packets and monitoring traffic specifically for realtors. Why not spend a couple days a week monitoring free wifi locations known to be frequented by realtors when you're going to steal 6 figure amounts each time? A realtor grabs a coffee and while there gets an email about closing next week and that same email is read by the person in the parking lot and it's off to the races. That's how a lot of the celebrity photo hacking happened, btw. Celebrities would hook up to hotel wifi and hackers would catch their email details for their icloud, then phish them with fake icloud emails. Same thing could be done to realtors hooking up to free wifi all over the damn place. The most sophisticated wire fraud I've seen executed against a title company was the entire amount of a seller's proceeds was swiped. The hacker got ahold of the realtors email, waited for the copy of the voided check to be scanned in, immediately photoshopped account information onto the voided check, and spoofed the realtor's email saying "sorry, wrong check. Use this one." The first check had already been verified by phone by the title company, didn't verify the fake one that came a mere 30 minutes after, and $320k was out the door. Title company was on the hook for that one. Moral of the story is to never hook up to free wifi. Also, these hackers are specifically targeting real estate transactions AND are intimately aware of the policies in place that are supposed to keep it from happening. That leads me to believe they have people in the industry feeding them the policy changes, because the fraud changes almost instantly with the policy changes. So, the only way to really avoid it is cashier's checks. If that isn't an option, verify the wiring instructions by calling the numbers provided in the contract hard copy ONLY. No numbers from email, websites, or anything else that can be electronically altered or spoofed. It may seem like a huge inconvenience in this day and age to have to deal with actual, honest to goodness, wood pulp paper, but suck it up. There's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.