Real estate scammers hitting Securexchange wall

Given a cybercrime is reported every ten minutes in Australia, you can be assured that property deals, with deposits and funds changing hand, has the attention of scammers.

However, the exact level of activity in the property industry is very hard to quantify, says Lee Bailie, head of Securexchange, a secure and collaborative workspace for property deals.

“Rather surprisingly, there is no reporting, so we have nothing firm we can quote. But anecdotally, we hear about it from absolutely everyone in the industry on a daily basis. We’d guess that somewhere between 1 in 20 have had at least an attempt at fraud, usually through email and text phishing. And rather concerningly, the numbers seem to be increasing.”

Read more