A Silicon Valley executive who was on the brink of buying a house instead ended up scammed out of nearly $400,000. Rana Robillard told her story to NBC News as a warning to other homebuyers about how sophisticated cybercrime has become. An email in late January, apparently from her mortgage broker, instructed her to wire her down payment, in the amount of $398,359.58, to a JPMorganChase account. She did so, only to start panicking the very next day when she received what appeared to be a duplicate request for the money. She soon learned she'd been scammed.
What followed was a monthslong nightmare in which her funds were frozen but not returned to her until NBC approached the banks involved about its article. Robillard says she now knows she should have verified that the wire transfer request was authentic, but she says the banks also could have done more, including verifying that the account receiving the funds belonged to a legitimate title company. It's still not clear who was behind the scam; NBC says the email from the fraudster was "indistinguishable" from other emails between Robillard and her mortgage processor. Meanwhile, Robillard is now able to start her home search anew. As she tells the Times of the original house, which is back on the market, "I don't want it any more. It's got a curse on it." (Earlier this year, a financial advice columnist relayed the harrowing tale of how she was scammed out of $50,000.)
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