As regular readers of Fraud Insights know, fraudsters have compromised the email addresses of outside third parties such as real estate agents, non–Fidelity escrow agents and/or the sellers in order to attempt to divert sales proceeds to a fraudulent bank account by providing fraudulent wire instructions.

In order to assist the industry combat wire fraud, the National Escrow Administration team ran a Jedi Knight contest in July 2016, for our direct operations to compete for cash prizes. The purposes of the contest:

• Heighten awareness of the signs that an email address of outside third parties, such as agents and sellers, might have been compromised and used to provide fraudulent wire instructions
• Train our associates on how to immediately recognize signs of those compromised emails when they appear
• Turn over the wire information to the bank, so the account is shut down to stop the crime from being attempted again
• Share information with our internal information security team
• Give away $$$$$!

Great job to everyone who entered! A total of 12 valid entries were received that met the Jedi Knight Contest criteria and succeeded in saving the Company $939,892.95 in proceeds from the dark side. Based on the valid submissions a weekly prize winner was selected at random and at the end of the contest a Grand Prize Winner was selected at random.