When Tina Brown and Phil Demarco decided to sell their home in New Jersey and purchase a new home in Colorado last December the last thing they expected was to receive a phony email from their realtor instructing them how and where to wire-transfer the closing funds.
Brown and Demarco were lucky. Their suspicions raised, they called their realtor, who told them she had sent no such email. The couple immediately notified the title company of the fraud.
In this case, timing and some healthy skepticism saved Brown and Demarco from what is commonly known as a business email compromise (BEC) attack.
