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Hackers try to steal your money every day by emailing fake wire instructions. Criminals will use a similar email address, steal a logo or other to make it look like the email came from your real estate agent, attorney, title company, or settlement agent. You can protect yourself and your money by following these steps:

Be Vigilant

Call, Don’t Email: Confirm your wiring instructions by phone using a known number before transferring funds. Do not use phone numbers or links from an email.

Be Suspicious: It’s uncommon for title companies to change their wiring instructions and payment info via email.

Protect Your Money

Confirm Everything: Ask your bank to confirm the name on the account before sending a wire.

Verify Immediately: Within four to eight hours of the wire transfer, give your real estate agent or us a call to confirm the money was received.

What to Do If You’ve Been Targeted

  1. Immediately call your bank and ask them to issue a recall notice for your wire.
  2. Report the crime to IC3.gov.
  3. Call your regional FBI office and police.
  4. Detecting that you sent the money to the wrong account within twenty-four hours of the transfer is the best chance of receiving your cashback.

Cyber Incident Preparedness Checklist

Before a Cyber Intrusion or Attack: 
  1. Identify mission-critical data and assets (your “crown jewels”) and institute tiered security measures to appropriately protect those assets.
  2. Review and adopt risk management practices found in guidance such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework.
  3. Have an actionable plan in place before an intrusion occurs
    1. Test Plan with (scheduled) exercises
    2. Keep plan up-to-date to reflect changes in personnel and structure
  4. Have appropriate technology and services in place before an intrusion occurs
  5. Have proper authorization in place to permit network monitoring
  6. Ensure your legal counsel is familiar with technology and cyber incident management to reduce response time during an incident.
  7. Ensure organization policies align with Incident Response (IR) plan
  8. Engage with law enforcement before an incident
  9. Establish relationships with cyber information-sharing organizations
After a Cyber Intrusion or Attack:
  1. Make an initial assessment of the scope and nature of the incident, mainly whether it is a malicious act or a technological glitch.
  2. Implement measures to minimize continuing damage.
  3. Record and collect information Image affected computer(s) Keep logs, notes, records, and data. Record any continuing activity/attacks
  4. Make appropriate notifications to
    1. Personnel within a company or the organization
    2. Federal and State law enforcement Regulators – Local and Homeland Security
    3. Other Potential victims
  5. Review response and remain vigilant
    1. Continue monitoring the network for any abnormal activity to ensure the intruder is expelled and you have regained control of your network.
    2. Conduct a post-incident review to identify deficiencies in the planning and execution of your incident response plan.
What Not to Do Following a Cyber Intrusion or Attack:
  1. Do not use the compromised system to communicate
  2. Do not try to ‘fix’ this yourself
  3. Do not hack into or damage another network
  4. Think that the problem is resolved after you correct
  5. Start using the repaired system or computer
  6. Think that this will never happen again
  7. Believe that your other systems and computers are safe.

Setco Services does NOT send any wiring instructions via email and will ONLY use our secure portal, Qualia, to send you wiring instructions. If you have an escrow or closing transaction with Setco and you receive an email containing wire transfer instructions, DO NOT RESPOND TO THE EMAIL! Instead, call your Closing Specialist immediately, using the previously known contact information and NOT information provided in the email, to verify the information before sending funds.

The wiring instructions provided to you through Qualia will only contain a partial account number to our bank account. You must call us to verify these wiring instructions and obtain the last four digits of the account number.

For more information on cyber security and how we work diligently to protect you, give us a call at 850.650.6161 or email us at info@SetcoServices.com.