Today the NJ Department of Banking and Insurance issued its advisory Bulletin No 18-04 addressing all banks in the state on the topic of wire fraud.

The notice explains the recent increase in fraud schemes involving the changing of wire instructions in an effort to steal mortgage loan proceeds.  It recommends that lenders do the following:

• Closely verify email addresses before using them. Scammers mimic legitimate
  addresses and subject lines, but they are not 100% identical.
• Avoid web-based email.
• Strictly follow your specific business procedures for confirming the validity of
  changes made to wire transfer instructions.
• Use a confirmation process, which may include verbal communication via a mutually agreed telephone number between the known parties, as well as mutually agreed code words designed to combat phone “porting.”

and most importantly…

• Get to know the fraud resistance capacity of your third-party service providers, especially closing agents; become sufficiently aware of the relevant parties’ normal wire transfer activity to recognize suspicious variations.

You may read the bulletin here: http://www.state.nj.us/dobi/bulletins/blt18_04.pdf

At Secure Insight our closing agent risk management platform not only verifies the source and ownership of an agent’s trust account, we also verify the status of the account and ensure it is a true trust account.  To find out more about our solutions visit: www.secureinsightsales.com