October Research presented “Fraud Threats Facing the Title Industry” with Jewel Quintyne, senior title operations consultant at Qualia, as moderator. Two title industry professionals — Jon Biggs, vice president and director of risk management at Investors Title Insurance Co., and Lindsay Nickle, partner and vice chair of cybersecurity and data privacy at Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete LLP spoke on the prevalence of fraud and offered insights on new fraud prevention techniques.
The FBI’s 2023 Cyber Crime Report detailed a record of over 800,000 criminal complaints. Throughout 2023, the instances of fraud increased by 22 percent, which resulted in over $12 billion in financial losses, Nickle reported. It is important to note that these numbers only encompass the reported instances of fraud, suggesting that it is “only a partial representation of the amount of fraud and crime that we see affecting all industries in the U.S,” Nickle said. “The title industry … [has] a lot of very sensitive data and a lot of funds transferring back and forth. [It is] a prime target for the type of criminal trends that we see.”
One type of fraud involves social engineering. “Social engineering is affecting all of us, and it gets monetized a lot of the time with wire fraud and payoff fraud,” Biggs said.
He then touched on seller impersonation fraud, which is sometimes referred to as vacant land fraud. “I want us to expand our understanding of that to include all non-owner occupied properties, including vacation homes and air-bnbs,” Biggs said. Seller impersonation fraud on the title of settlement side involves being approached by a remote seller who is not known to the realtor or whoever else is involved in the process. “If you don’t know the person, there are other steps we’re going to talk about in order to prevent this. … You’re not going to depend on someone else’s (e.g. the realtor’s) due diligence. You have to depend on your own,” Biggs added. Some of these steps include investigating the notary or choosing instead of “treating the notary acknowledgment like holy water being sprinkled on the document to make it invincible,” Biggs said.
Over the hour, Nickle and Biggs also discussed:
- Ransomware
- Seller impersonation fraud
- AI phishing and deepfakes
- Multi-Factor Authentication
To learn more about precautions and methods to mitigate the threat of fraud, the webinar can be found here.