A mother and daughter have been scammed out of almost $200,000 - losing all their life savings.
Vicki Ragle, a retired teacher, and her daughter, Sarah, were in the process of buying a townhome in Colorado, US.
The scammers created spoof emails posing as their lender, title company, and realtor, and intercepted the chain of emails to trick the victims into wiring the funds to them instead of the legitimate parties involved in the home-buying process.
The victims were not aware that they were being scammed until it was too late, and they had already wired the money to the fraudsters.
They disappeared with the money, leaving the victims devastated and with all their life savings gone.
Ms Ragle and her daughter said they received fraudulent emails that looked identical to the authentic emails they had been receiving before the scammers got involved.
Then, two days before they were supposed to close on the townhome, the victims received an email requesting the $196,662.81 due to close, purportedly from the title company, with a deadline of 48 hours to send the funds.
Ms Ragle told Fox31 Denver : “At some point, the chain of emails got hacked. I started getting fraud emails and I didn’t realise they were fraud emails.
"We were supposed to close on a Friday, then on Wednesday they told me they needed the funds in 48 hours or it won’t happen.
"I said, ‘OK, I will call in an hour and we can do that,' they emailed back stating, ‘Don’t call ’cause I’ll be in a closing, but here’s the information.'”
They sent the money as instructed by the fraudulent email and, on the day of the closing, the victims discovered that the money was gone and reported the incident to the Lakewood Police, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI.
This type of scam, called business email compromise, is unfortunately not uncommon and has been reported to cost billions of dollars nationwide, especially in real estate transactions, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
“We went to closing on Friday, everyone was laughing and excited. We signed acres of papers, then the title lady said, ‘Let me check your funds,' the title lady said, ‘Where did you send the funds to?’ And I said, ‘I sent them to you,’ and she said, ‘We don’t have them.'”
Ms Ragle realised they had lost their entire life savings, including earnest money for the home and new furniture they had purchased.
A friend of the daughter started a GoFundMe to help the two ladies get back on their feet.
Ragle said: “All I could think is now I’m homeless and broke. I’m 69 years old, and now I’m broke and homeless, I walked out of there and I threw up.”
The CBI said it is working to capture or freeze as much of the funds as possible so they can be returned to the victims.
