Scammers Want Me to Sell Your Land
In today’s digital age, it’s easier than ever to stay connected with friends, family, and businesses. However, it’s also easier than ever for scammers to reach out to you through these channels and try to steal your personal information or money. Now they are reaching out to Realtors to perpetrate their scams.
Are all real estate agents watching out for these scams?
I don’t know if you have seen this scam in the news, but it is a thing. As more people become aware they don’t actually have a distant cousin who was the King of Nigeria and no you are not inheriting millions of dollars from this long-dead relative. The scammers are moving on to new scams to steal your hard-earned money and assets.
The Land Scam
We real estate agents typically answer our phones. You see we don’t have the luxury of ignoring all of the unknown numbers. That call can and often is a new client who needs help with a real estate transaction. So we answer our phones. I don’t know how every agent does it but in my business, I make a diligent effort to help people with what I can and sometimes that turns into a real estate transaction.
You need to understand that real estate agents only get paid when a deal closes. There is no salary, no advance, and no share in the office revenue. Nope, until a transaction closes, money changes hands and someone gets the key in their hand we are not being paid we are working to earn that next commission.
Scammers know this and they want to bait us with the prospect of selling a property. They contact a real estate agent to request a property valuation report on a piece of bare land. They have some story that they are working out of the country and need to sell it. Why land? For starters, no one is living there, it’s not so easy to see who the owner is. After they get the report then they ask the agent if they would list it for sale for them. That is every agent’s dream, someone calls up and says hey, will you sell this property for me. They usually want to sell it cheaply too.
Artificial Intelligence
Thanks to the rise of some amazing AI tools these scammers can actually write emails without the stupid spelling and grammar mistakes that made them seem like an obvious scam in the past. They can even make phone calls to the agent, sounding like a native English speaker on the phone. In some cases, they have even provided what appears to be a legitimate government-issued photo identification, to verify their identity.
I cannot tell you what every agent does, but I can tell you that we have certain procedures we go through to ensure that the seller is who they say they are.
- We work with the escrow company to ensure that this is legit.
- We will mail a letter to the address on file with the county treasures office to verify the seller is who they say they are.
- So if you move and your mailing address changes make sure that you notify the treasurer’s office.
- The Escrow office will only accept signed and notarized documents that have been notarized with:
- A mobile notary is chosen by the escrow company.
- At a US consulate in another country.
Using their own Notary is a scammer tactic they like to use.
Conclusion
In the end, the scammers will keep coming up with new and ingenious ways to steal your money and your assets. Keep vigilant and NEVER EVER give your personal information to anyone who called you. If they need to verify anything, call them back on a phone number that you have from your own research. Google the business and ensure that the website you are looking at ends in a .com or .net. Phishing scams are one in which a scammer calls, texts, or emails you portraying to be someone you should know in order to get you to give them one more piece of information so that they can use that knowledge to then reset a password or get your phone number ported to their phone. Just hang up.
