A former real-estate agent and her husband had to dip into retirement savings to buy a house after being scammed out of $63,000

“There was an urgency to get escrow closed that day, which, for us, didn’t really matter,” Rich said. “We were buying it while we still had our house in California, so we shouldn’t have fallen for being pressured into it. We should have just slowed down and taken our time.”

“We were just trying to go with the flow and we didn’t want to be the ones holding up escrow,” Rich added.

Even Laurie, who was a real-estate agent until 2017, was unfamiliar with the escrow process.

“I wasn’t involved so much with escrow — escrow handled all that,” she said. “I made sure they walked clients through and I never had that experience.”

Laurie had noticed a few grammatical errors in the email containing the fraudulent wiring instructions, but since she hadn’t communicated much with the escrow officer beforehand, she chalked them up to harmless mistakes.

The Ramelows’ story follows a common pattern

Lisa Plaggemier, the executive director at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates cybersecurity awareness and education, said the Ramelows’ case followed a pattern she’s seen before.

“The telltale signs of the language being a little bit off and that sense of urgency,” Plaggemier told BI. “Those are two consistent things that we see very often.”

Small mistakes, like the missing “s” on Regions Bank in the escrow email, weren’t flagged by the bank teller.

“I think that a lot of banks train their frontline staff to look for things like this,” Plaggemier said.

“It sounds like obviously there was a missed opportunity there,” she added.

“While we will not discuss individual customer interactions out of respect for client privacy, we can confirm our bankers are trained to ask questions of anyone requesting a wire transfer, and those questions are designed, in part, to help detect instances of fraud,” a spokesperson for Regions Bank told BI over email.

The Ramelows had to liquidate retirement accounts to revive the deal

The Ramelows still wanted to be closer to their daughter, so the sale continued, but they had to sacrifice accumulated wealth.

“It was pretty devastating,” Rich said. “We had to liquidate some funds from IRAs from retirement. It did have to cost penalties and that sort of thing, but we didn’t want it to drastically fall through so we could still move on.”

Laurie and Rich weren’t the only ones affected by the scam.

Laurie’s parents had contributed $20,000 to the $63,000 that was lost. They were able to retrieve that $20,000, save for a couple thousand dollars.

The Ramelows, however, are still waiting to recover their money.

They’re working with wire-fraud-protection company CertifID and the Secret Service to recover the funds, but their window is closing.

“Usually the 90 to 120 days is when they would release funds back,” Rich said. “We’re still hoping, we’re hopeful, but we understand, and we’ve learned our lesson.”