WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CN) - Plaintiffs in a string of lawsuits filed across South Florida want Wells Fargo and Bank of America held liable for allegedly failing to stop email-impersonation scams used by crooks to steal wire transfers in real estate deals and commercial sales.
The plaintiffs claim the banks should promptly reimburse them for money they lost when wire transfers for their real estate deals and commercial sales were diverted by thieves, who used fraudulent emails to impersonate attorneys, closing agents, and counterparties involved in the transactions.
The influx of litigation indicates that this type of impostor email scam remained prevalent in South Florida through the summer of 2017.
Among the lawsuits is an Oct. 5 complaint filed by plaintiff Christopher Schuman. He claims a thief, posing as his attorney for a South Florida property purchase, contacted him via email and duped him and his private banker at Wells Fargo into wiring a $585,000 down payment into a Bank of America account, controlled by the fraudster or his associates.
The Wells Fargo banker processed the wire for Schuman remotely in early July 2017. The banker received the wire instructions directly from a fraudulent email purporting to be from Schuman's attorney, according to the complaint.
Schuman says before he realized what was transpiring, the impostor tried to bilk him out of another $254,000, telling him to wire over that sum as the remaining down payment amount.
Schuman says that luckily, he contacted his attorney by phone to discuss the transaction. The attorney denied knowing about either wire request, and at that point, Schuman discovered he had been the victim of a con artist, he says.
A $300,000 chunk of the stolen $585,000 was frozen by bank representatives, but the crook(s) managed to siphon off $285,000 "to a location in South Africa," Schuman says.
Schuman claims Wells Fargo was aware of these types of schemes but had "ineffective fraud prevention practices" in place to prevent them. His lawsuit alleges Wells Fargo could have readily thwarted the fraud by calling up the intended wire recipient prior to executing the transfer, or by contacting Bank of America to make sure the receiving account was authentic.
Schuman demands damages from Bank of America as well, alleging that the bank failed to follow customer identification protocols, and neglected to investigate the transfer to South Africa "despite knowledge of widespread international fraudulent banking activities" originating from the country.
On the heels of Schuman's lawsuit, a similar civil action against Bank of America popped up in Palm Beach County court.
That action alleges that plaintiff Donn Sanders was bilked out of his $17,000 payment towards a local property purchase, after he was given fraudulent wire instructions in June 2017. A thief had given him the wire instructions through a scam email that impersonated a title company agent involved the transaction.
Sanders claims Bank of America "failed to perform the simplest safety check: match the named recipient of the subject wire transfer with the named recipient's account."
The wire was allowed to proceed even though the destination account was a personal account, as opposed to a title company account, according to the complaint.
Sanders is seeking damages from Bank of America and Smoky Mountain Title, as well as a real estate agency and mortgage financier tied to the transaction.
