Why lawyers need to stop emailing Trust Account details and Contracts

Australian businesses lost more than $7.2 million to email scammers last year with a reported loss of $107 million to Scamwatch, ACORN and other government agencies that monitor fraud, according to a new Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) report.

“Scammers are hacking business email systems and impersonating the intended payment recipient,” ACCC deputy chair Mick Keogh said in announcing the new findings. “Depending on how long the scammers get away with this and how large the transfers are, this scam can be devastating to a business’s bottom line – to the extent of forcing small and medium businesses into closure.”

Earlier this year, InfoTrack launched Securexchange to protect lawyers and their clients from the threat of large financial loss during property exchanges. “We’re witnessing how vulnerable the property industry has become to cyber-fraud due to the high-value nature of online property transactions” says InfoTrack CEO, John Ahern. Last year Victorian property buyers collectively lost more than $200,000 to a hacking scam targeting the email accounts of real estate agents. A Brisbane man lost $90,000 of his deposit proceeds from the sale of his Gold Coast investment property and two property buyers in South Australia also lost close to $1 million through email scams.

Legal-tech pace setter, InfoTrack is the first to offer a financial guarantee for online property deposits and the first to offer a solution which stops the need to share trust account details via unsecured emails. Securexchange’s newest feature gives lawyers the ability to securely share an Electronic Contract of Sale (eCos) with real estate agents directly from the InfoTrack platform. This coupled with the ability for lawyers to share Trust Account details securely with other parties, provides legal and conveyancing professionals with a real answer to combat cyber-fraud at no expense to their firm.

Ahern goes on to say that “InfoTrack has made a commitment to support our clients through the transition to e-conveyancing and Securexchange is enabling a further component of the e-conveyancing workflow to be secure, transparent and efficient for all parties.”

InfoTrack will be demonstrating how to securely share Trust Account details and contracts at the upcoming complimentary Risks & Rewards of e-conveyancing seminars.