Walters: California’s pricey explosion of real estate fraud hits home

Rana Robillard came very close this year to losing her life’s savings and with it her dream home, when she wired nearly $400,000 to an internet scammer.

Robillard, ironically, is an experienced veteran of the Bay Area technology industry, but when she received what she thought was a request for her down payment on a home in Orinda, she sent the money, only to learn that she had been tricked.

“That’s when I went into a full panic,” Robillard, 55, told CNBC, the cable channel devoted to financial matters, which chronicled her terrifying experience.

Robillard was not alone in being victimized.

The real estate industry has fully embraced online transactions, thus eliminating the hassle of having buyers, sellers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders and title company employees shuffle through dozens of paper documents that must be signed or initialed to complete transactions.

It’s made the process of buying and selling houses much more convenient, but it’s also given scammers an opening for fraud that has cost home buyers many millions of dollars.

The request for down payment that Robillard received was virtually identical to the many email messages she had exchanged and, in fact, was the only bogus one, which is why scammers have been so successful.

Cyber crooks have mastered the dark art of mimicking legitimate messages, complete with the real names of title company employees and authentic-looking logos, and artificial intelligence could make their scams even more successful in the future.

FBI data, CNBC reported, reveal that real estate fraud involving bogus emails has risen from less than $9 million in 2015 to $446.1 million in 2022.

A study of real estate fraud commissioned by Anidjar and Levine, a Florida law firm, found that California’s 1,583 cases in 2023 far surpassed those of any other state, as did its $24.8 million in losses.

Robillard is one of the lucky victims. She quickly reported her loss and her $398,359.5 was tracked through several banks as the thieves shifted it around to avoid detection. Five months later, after CNBC began making inquiries, she received $150,000 from one bank and then the remaining nearly $250,000 from another.

Robillard contacted CNBC about her case both to help her recover the money and bring more attention to the real estate fraud explosion.

“This is not what I thought my public representation would look like, which is that I’ve lost all this money,” Robillard told CNBC. “If it helps other people, I’m happy to do it, even though it’s obviously not my proudest moment.”

I take a particular interest in Robillard’s case not only because it’s important but because I came within a whisker last week of also becoming a victim.

I, too, received a very authentic-looking instruction from the title company handling my purchase of a smaller home for downsizing, seeking down payment and closing costs to complete the purchase. It seemingly came from the title company employee who had been handling my transaction and had all of the appearances of a legitimate communication.

I intended to comply with the request a few hours later, but then received a phone call from my lender about closing the transaction. I told him of the request and he immediately smelled a rat.

That phone call was a lifesaver. A few days later, I presented a valid cashier’s check to the title company employee whose identity had been borrowed by the scammer and signed the legitimate paperwork to finalize the purchase.

One of the documents I signed was a warning about phony payment instructions. Perhaps it should have been one of the first documents I was given, rather than one of the last.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.