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Earlier this year, Laurie and Rich Ramelow decided to leave California and move to Texas to be closer to their daughter.
Laurie, a former real-estate agent, and Rich, a project manager for a telecommunications company, found a 1,901-square-foot, four-bedroom home in San Antonio that seemed perfect.
After their offer was accepted, they were sent instructions on a Friday in April to wire the escrow money. The following Monday, they heard from the escrow officer asking them to send the money they'd already sent.
"She called and said, 'Where's the money?" Laurie, 55, told Business Insider. "I said, 'What?'"
The Ramelows were victims of a scam.
A fraudster had impersonated the Ramelows' escrow officer and swindled about $63,000 from them.
"The timing was right, and the fraudster knew the address and all the parties involved," Laurie said.
The Ramelows still ended up closing on the house in San Antonio, but it cost them a chunk of their future.
Prior to being scammed, the Ramelows were living in a house in Simi Valley, California, a city near Los Angeles, and weren't in a serious rush to buy their new home.
The California home — also four bedrooms and just over 1,900 square feet — was their primary residence for over 30 years after they purchased it from Rich's parents. That buying process was a lot different.
"It wasn't escrow with all these parties and everything transpiring," Rich, 55, told BI. "It was a quick and easy process with escrow because it was among family."
The San Antonio purchase was, essentially, the Ramelows' first time buying a house on their own. They received wiring instructions — having never wired money before — and noticed a certain urgency from the other side. But they kept going.
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"There was an urgency to get escrow closed that day, which, for us, didn't really matter," Rich said. "We were buying it while we still had our house in California, so we shouldn't have fallen for being pressured into it. We should have just slowed down and taken our time."
"We were just trying to go with the flow and we didn't want to be the ones holding up escrow," Rich added.
Even Laurie, who was a real-estate agent until 2017, was unfamiliar with the escrow process.
"I wasn't involved so much with escrow — escrow handled all that," she said. "I made sure they walked clients through and I never had that experience."
Laurie had noticed a few grammatical errors in the email containing the fraudulent wiring instructions, but since she hadn't communicated much with the escrow officer beforehand, she chalked them up to harmless mistakes.
Lisa Plaggemier, the executive director at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates cybersecurity awareness and education, said the Ramelows' case followed a pattern she's seen before.
"The telltale signs of the language being a little bit off and that sense of urgency," Plaggemier told BI. "Those are two consistent things that we see very often."
Small mistakes, like the missing "s" on Regions Bank in the escrow email, weren't flagged by the bank teller.
"I think that a lot of banks train their frontline staff to look for things like this," Plaggemier said.
"It sounds like obviously there was a missed opportunity there," she added.
"While we will not discuss individual customer interactions out of respect for client privacy, we can confirm our bankers are trained to ask questions of anyone requesting a wire transfer, and those questions are designed, in part, to help detect instances of fraud," a spokesperson for Regions Bank told BI over email.
Courtesy of the Ramelows
The Ramelows still wanted to be closer to their daughter, so the sale continued, but they had to sacrifice accumulated wealth.
"It was pretty devastating," Rich said. "We had to liquidate some funds from IRAs from retirement. It did have to cost penalties and that sort of thing, but we didn't want it to drastically fall through so we could still move on."
Laurie and Rich weren't the only ones affected by the scam.
Laurie's parents had contributed $20,000 to the $63,000 that was lost. They were able to retrieve that $20,000, save for a couple thousand dollars.
The Ramelows, however, are still waiting to recover their money.
They're working with wire-fraud-protection company CertifID and the Secret Service to recover the funds, but their window is closing.
"Usually the 90 to 120 days is when they would release funds back," Rich said. "We're still hoping, we're hopeful, but we understand, and we've learned our lesson."
