A San Diego couple have described themselves as being tormented after a scammer tricked them out of $800,000 through a bogus home downpayment request.
More on this heart-breaking story here:
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Kevin and Nicole Noar were excited about finally living the American dream. Now, their days are only filled with nightmares with the only comfort for them being their one-year-old son, Deklan.
“We can’t sleep,” Nicole says. “You go through so many different feelings and then the worst part is the morning because you just wake up and you keep feeling like it’s still real. You just want to wake up and feel like it didn’t happen and it did.”
They’re currently staying with family in Solana Beach. They thought they had finally closed on their dream home located in Carlsbad, hoping to set up a happy future for Deklan.
“All of this was for him,” Nicole says. “The house, with the yard, with schools, and so he could have a sibling.”
All that fell apart when the roughly $775,000 down payment, 60 percent of the purchase price, that they thought they had wired to their escrow company was actually sent to an account in Singapore, an account a hacker controls.
The money had come from previous homeownership and inheritance money and they were hoping to finally make the life their family deserved. Now, those dreams are in tatters with no way to recoup the costs. Nicole works as a nurse while Kevin is a chef and they don’t make enough money between them to put up that amount again.
“It’s literally all the money that we had to get this house so that we could have a low enough mortgage payment that we could afford,” said Nicole.
It all started from the fake emails Nicole received from a hacker who made it appear they were coming from the escrow company and real estate agent (who was away attending to a death in the family). Kevin says the emails looked legitimate.
The Noars are partly blaming the escrow company because an employee sent them official wire instructions through an unsecured email. No account number was indicated in the email but the hacker intercepted the email and inserted account numbers to a bitcoin exchange.
They then went to the bank with the document but the bank failed to notice the bitcoin clue. Once they wired the funds, Nicole called the escrow company. She said the escrow company should have been alerted at that point because they had never sent them any instructions.
“They called back, they called to tell me what time the notary would be here the next day to sign our loan docs,” Nicole said.
They are now trying to decide what legal options they have and have also contacted the FBI for help. In the meantime, the couple requested that the escrow company remain unidentified pending what legal action they decide to take.
According to the FBI, most targets of these types of scams are Californians. A lot of escrow companies put out warnings telling customers not to accept wire instructions through e-mail and to call instead. One other strategy is to forward the emails to the escrow agent instead of hitting reply without checking the address.
Around 50,000 Californians were victimized in internet financial scams in 2019 with a loss of more than $593 million. The FBI says this is the biggest number in the US.
“Typically, escrow will send the wire instructions to the buyer via some sort of secured email, so be very suspicious if you receive (unsecured) wire instructions from an escrow or title company, especially if the escrow or title company is not the same title company or the same escrow company that you’re dealing with,” said Mark Goldman, a loan officer at C2 Financial.
In the meantime, the Noars put up a GoFundMe in the hopes of making up for the loss.
Replaced!