When California Homeowners Face Loans They Never Took Out | Jay Hibert

For most Californians right now real estate is their number one asset. But at the same time there's a lot of fraudulent cases trying to steal your home by taking the deed without you even knowing it and actually applying for loans. Today we sit down with Jay Heiberg who's an expert in this field. He's gonna tell us what he's seeing right now, what type of scams are going on that could take real estate from some of the wealthiest and average residents in California. Many situations where a homeowner will return, there's new locks on the door, new alarm system, and there's somebody else totally in control of the house and they had no idea. Jay, it's great to have you on. Welcome. Thank you. We want to talk to you about real estate fraud in California. A lot of people actually have their homes as their biggest asset in California and the home values have gone up significantly. But at the same time, it looks like there's a lot of fraud picking up in the real estate space. You're an expert in this field. Can you tell us what you're seeing out there? Sure. First of all, I would say that it's very true that for most people, it's the largest asset. And asset values, as you know, for home real estate values have really gone up a tremendous amount in the last several years, post-COVID really. And what that's done is it's created an opportunity for the bad guys, as I say. And I'll just start by saying, look, I was in banking and been part of banking and real estate finance for now over 40 years. And 25 of those were directly working in the real estate area of a bank. And I didn't realize how bad fraud could be or how bad the fraud was, even though I knew about it working in that field. But now I'm exposed to it on a daily basis because I consult in the area of fraud and how to prevent it with lenders and do a lot of research into the area and it has it's it's increased tremendously both because of the technology that's available to create documents to fake documents and let's just say the fraudsters have gotten better to knowing what to do in in in order to what i say steal a house sounds sounds crazy but there are folks that actually steal homes and then leverage those homes and take out loans and then take the cash from those loans and then move on. Can you tell us about some examples? Because this is very shocking. So they take a loan in their name or your name, but it's on your real estate? Multiple answers. I'll give you a couple of examples, some true case studies of cases that I've had. And when I say cases that I've had, I provide consulting in the litigation field when a situation of real estate fraud or real estate finance fraud occurs. And a lot of the clients that I provide that work for or support or consulting for are title insurance companies because they're the ones that have to pay on the insurance when something like this occurs because they've insured the title or insured the transaction. And if they have, then they're the ones that need to support the homeowner or support who has that policy, if you will, or who's the beneficiary of the policy, if that makes sense. So a couple of real life examples would be, say, if you're the bad guy and you notice there's a vacant house, you know somebody's been, they travel quite a bit and you see the pattern and you know when they're not there. So you just happen by and take the mail out of the mailbox and you happen to come across a document that identifies the owner. You take that document and do a little research and it's available online. And you find out if they're the actual listed owner on the deed, if you will, if there's a mortgage and a trust deed. And you find out how the ownership is set. And then you manufacture documents to transfer the ownership from that party to yourself or to another entity that you've created a false entity. And now the deed transfers because you've forged the signature of the true owner. And then you've created the document to yourself or to another entity. And you sign that as the receiver of that property. So you now have the grantor and now you're the grantee. And now you have the deed to the property. And now you represent yourself as an owner of the property. and you take that asset and you request a loan using that asset and leverage the real estate. And if the lender is not able to detect that fraud has occurred and the title insurance company can't detect that it's occurred, then a loan transaction can be made. And then the fraudster takes the money. They leave the country oftentimes or leave town. The homeowner doesn't find out until the foreclosure notice shows up in the mailbox because the payments haven't been made because the fraudster has no intention of making the payments. Wow. And how much is the loan? I see these cases happen anywhere in the low six figures up to multiple millions of dollars. I've got situations in very affluent areas, Newport Beach, for example, where folks do this multiple times before they leave the country, where you'll have a $3 million loan and then another $3 million loan and then another $3 million loan with multiple properties. Sometimes it's the same property with multiple lenders. Once they've figured out that they're able to fool the lender and fool the title company, they'll do it again and leverage the house as much as they possibly can. Sometimes they take out a second loan to repay the first loan to show that there's some sort of performance. Again, fool the lender, and then they can take this track record to the next lender and get another loan. So I've had cases up into the multiple millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the homeowner has no idea. Homeowner has no idea. I've had many situations where a homeowner will return. There's new locks on the door, new alarm system, and there's somebody else totally in control of the house and they had no idea. So you have that type of situation as well where they didn't just leverage the house, but they've actually taken occupancy of the house. part-time, not expecting the owners to come back. And then the homeowner comes back and then they do a title search and find out that they're not even on title anymore. It's pretty frightening, the kinds of things that occur. And how does that work legally? Because this is a crime, right? Is it going to go down as a crime or how does that work? Absolutely. So many of the situations that I get involved with do involve criminal charges because it's outright fraud. I'm certainly not a fraud investigator. That's not what I do. What I do is I look at the documentation and the trail of the chain of documents to help educate the title company or the lender or the attorney as to what took place. How did this actually happen? And was there something in the file that somebody should have known about or could have known about. That's my job as a litigation consultant. But it's definitely criminal when there's an outright fraud like that. Sometimes it's bank fraud. Sometimes there's wire fraud. Sometimes there's both. And many of the times, these folks that are the bad guys are put in jail. But also a lot of these cases that happen, individuals leave country or they send the money out of the country and then they're never uh never caught inside the US so even though it's a criminal offense they don't do any time because they're not caught or they're they're named and it might be a false name or they bury their name far enough and then the loan is taken out by an entity and so it it makes it very difficult but yeah definitely it's a criminal offense so when people that are occupying the home what are they thinking do they think they're not going to get caught well i'll just give you a couple of crazy examples um yes is the answer they think they're not going to get caught i've seen everything from younger younger folks using homes as party party places right hosting large raves just thinking it's a short-term you know idea or event and and then they get caught all the way up to I've seen, and I can't disclose any of this, it's confidential, but I've seen some of the TV shows where you have reality shows. And there was a reality show one time being filmed in a home that actually had been stolen. And the owners of the home were Chinese citizens and they would be in China for a year and in the US for a year working. And while they were in China, their house was stolen in a scenario that i explained and then when they got back their house was occupied by a crew filming a reality tv show if you can believe it and so i've seen some things that i never would have believed but i but i see them and uh and i see it happen all the time how long can it go for like these cases like is it is it six months is it three months so once it's rediscovered. Unfortunately, these cases take years to resolve. I've had cases that have taken five years, but I would say on average it's three to five years. It takes quite a long time. Sometimes they resolve more quickly depending on the parties involved, but when it's a criminal charge like this and you have a homeowner that literally has lost their house and now the bank or the lender has technical rights to the house because they made a loan and the loan was insured, now you have a problem because they want the collateral because they're out the money, right? So even though they made the loan and the fraudster took the money and the homeowner is out of the house, the bank, and I'm not here to give any kind of a legal opinion, but the bank has made a loan that's been insured. And so as far as they're concerned, they made a good loan. And the title company, as far as they're concerned, insured clean title even though fraud now has occurred so it's up to the courts to decide how much each party will get and will the homeowner get anything back in some cases a homeowner actually loses their home wow so even the title insurance doesn't cover this it can but what many people don't know is when they buy a home and they borrow money the banks work with the title companies to ensure the mortgage instrument or the trust deed for their loan. Homeowners seldom get what's known as an owner's policy to insure their position. And so if they have a policy to insure their position, then that's very helpful and useful. I can't say that 100% of the time the banks have those positions, but that would be the standard to always have that for a lender a lender's policy but homeowners don't often have owner's policies and if they don't have an owner's policy they're not protected they're not protected so most of the time that title insurance that we get with the when we buy a home it's covering the the lender it's not covering that that's correct you're reviewing you're reviewing a lender's policy you're paying for a lender's policy as a borrower and owner banks pass that cost on to the borrower owner but without having an actual owner's policy to protect your position and ownership that can be a real problem if you can walk me through one of these because people need to really know about this because it could impact them significantly most of the wealth is in the housing some people have paid off their mortgages correct this is their really their retirement so somebody comes in finds a way to to forge documents get a mortgage on the house maybe transfer the ownership to an LLC or transfer the ownership to themselves, get a mortgage on the house. And then you as a homeowner, it will take you three to five years to figure out, to prove that this was fraud. And then at the end of it, if you own the home, if you get it back, you still owe to the bank. Correct. That can be a scenario. So for example, in that scenario, we have a free and clear home and a loan is taken out. Let's just say it's a $2 million home, not unrealistic in Southern California. And so the bad guy takes out the bad entity to the bad players, take out a million dollar loan because a bank or a lender sees that as a very low risk because it's just a 50% of the value of the home. So they get this million dollar loan and then they don't pay. And the homeowner doesn't know anything until the foreclosure notices show up. And the homeowner says, well, first of all, this isn't me that took out the loan. Second of all, I own the home. So what's going on, right? That's the first reaction. So what they do, they're going to contact, typically, law enforcement, and they're going to contact legal support to find out what they need to do because the bank is trying to foreclose, so they need to stop the foreclosure. That's the first step. Unfortunately, the homeowner is put into a situation of having to stop a foreclosure that they didn't cause. So the first step is the legal process to stop that, and everybody recognizes, okay, we have a fraud. The homeowner clearly is saying they didn't do this. this isn't their name and then they check the what's known as the chain of title chain of ownership meaning go into the historical records and see that yes in fact they own the house we're now seeing this transfer deed to this other entity and they're saying they didn't sign these documents they're saying they did not make the transfer so we know we have a conflict so now we have a lawsuit what's going to happen is the lender who's trying to foreclose is going to have most likely title insurance to protect their position because when they made the loan to the bad guy, they thought they were making a bona fide loan. So they go to the title company and they say, well, hey, these guys aren't going to let us foreclose. We have a million dollars. We want the million dollars. So we want you to pay us our million dollars because you insured the policy. Now the title company hires legal counsel because they now want to get involved and say, well, wait a minute. Was it a fraud? Because they don't really know, right? They don't know. They're just being told that there's a fraud. So they have to hire legal counsel and decide, was this really a fraud? Was this a bona fide transaction? Do we really owe the money? Because if we owe the money, now we're out a million dollars. And so they want the collateral to recover. So the situation arises now for the courts to decide, is the homeowner going to be out everything? Is the title company going to have rights to the house? Is the lender going to have rights to the house? Or is the title company going to just pay on the policy because they discover that it is an outright fraud? and the courts decide that there was no way anybody could have known, right? That's the issue. So there's a big risk for homeowners. That's right. And the best way to protect that, there's a couple things. One, make sure you don't leave your mail in the mailbox when you travel. It just sounds silly. But a lot of the issues that I get involved with are people that are literally taking things out of the mailbox. But you can find that online too, right? Who owns the home? You can. but people you need for loans oftentimes you need proof of residency so you need a bill you need a gas electric bill a telephone bill or something a lot of that is happening electronically for a lot of people for a lot of people it's not they're still coming in the mail so you can take those and you can doctor those documents to now represent that I'm living there look this is my gas electric bill you can change their names online or a kind of like with PDF you can use. Correct. So stealing mail is what I see is a big issue. And then number two, check with a title company or check with somebody in legal counsel to have regular checks of title to make sure that your title is the way it should be and get it insured. Have an owner's policy. Even if the loan's paid off, make sure you have an owner's policy. Make sure that you've got somebody insuring your ownership and protecting you, but regular checkups. People don't think that that's important, but it is, you know, because things can happen to title. It could be anything minor too. Sometimes there could be a misplaced tax lien, just a paperwork issue down at the county office. And you won't know if you don't check title. It's like, it's like I tell people when you, you go to buy a car and the credit reports run and they find out you don't have a credit score you thought you had because there's something on your credit report that's not valid. You wouldn't know if you didn't check. Nowadays, a lot of people check online their credit scores regularly. They don't check title. So it's a similar situation, analogous to checking your own credit report. Now, there was a story in San Diego. We were approached by some of our audience that told us that somebody paid for their taxes, property taxes, for five years, for a few years and there's a there was a scam in San Diego that people got letters saying that they don't have to pay their taxes because their taxes are forgiven for seniors there is an element there too like where people if somebody makes the payments on your behalf can you tell us about that is that does that happen absolutely happens it absolutely happens and and you you brought up a sort of a subtopic there when you mentioned the elder population um and and they're they're a target, unfortunately, but they're a target of the fraudsters as well, both from convincing them to sell a property to convincing them to take out a loan and then having a bona fide transaction because the elder actually signs on the paperwork and doesn't transfer the house, but the funds aren't transferred to them and they don't benefit from the funds, if that makes sense, right? The clear abuse of someone who maybe doesn't have the capacity to act on their behalf. So the same is true with with the the tax payments and what can happen in that situation is the payments on cases that i've seen aren't truly made and then there can be a tax lien auction and if the homeowner is not aware of that and then now somebody can acquire the home through the foreclosure on the tax side and so that's the type of thing that i see happen quite a bit throughout the country not just in southern california so if something like that happens you you have a tax lien on your property are you notified do most people know that this is happening to them or can they lose the home without really knowing yes um you should be notified you should know a person should know but again as i mentioned uh previously um the the fraudsters are getting better at what they do it's like you hear about the middle middle man on the email, right? Forged emails, fraudulent emails. When someone gets into your computer, they find out your codes, they can now create a false email address and the emails are actually going to them and not to you. The sender thinks that they're going to you. The same as in the mail. They change addresses and now the notices aren't going to the homeowner. So the homeowner doesn't know. So they don't check and they're just being told that they're being paid. That's a red flag owners need to be aware but again if they're if they're preying on someone who doesn't have the capacity or who isn't checking on that regularly or a family member doesn't know to check on that then the bad guy is getting the notices and the good so they could even change your mail address 100 percent and do they target everyone or is it like certain real estate sites where it's like you have a multimillion-dollar home, you're more of a target, or is it everyone? Equity. Targeting equity. The elder population, for a couple reasons, is a target. Mental capacity, sometimes, right? So the bad guys are trying to take advantage of someone who doesn't have the capacity to make good decisions. It's sad, but that's the truth. And number two, they're targeted because generally, not always, but generally speaking, if they've been in their house a long time, they've got equity. And that's what the bad guys need. They want the money. They need the equity. Without that equity, they can't get a loan anyway, right? If the home is leveraged with a new home buyer and only 10% or 20% down payment, there's nothing to leverage for another loan. So there's nothing to take, if you will. Does it matter if the home has a mortgage on it or doesn't have a mortgage? If you don't have a mortgage, is it easier? That's a great question. And again, it depends on the equity. If there is a loan, again, these stories sound crazy, but I have many, many real life examples of what these things, when this happens. So say there's a mortgage, a first trust deed mortgage. Let's just use round numbers again. Say the house is worth a million dollars and there's a $250,000 mortgage on the home. The bad guy can go to a lender now and say, I need a half a million dollar loan. I want to pay off my, because he's forged the documents. I want to pay off my $250,000 loan. And I want another $250,000 because I'm going to start a business and they have a business plan. Or I'm going to buy another house and I'm going to renovate that house as part of a business plan. This happens all of the time in the house home renovation industry. So now the lender is being pitched what they believe to be a bona fide transaction. It sounds like a professional business transaction. Makes sense. We need to be in first position. So it makes sense. We're going to pay the mortgage off. So, oh, that makes sense. Let's pay off the mortgage. We'll give you the $250,000. You've got a business plan. it's a business purpose loan. So now it's regulated differently. It's a great transaction. Let's move forward and do this. So it makes it sound like it's even a more bona fide transaction than someone who merely is taking a free and clear home and just deciding to take out a half a million dollars in cash, if that makes sense. So even that happens. So they pay off, they're going to end up paying off the other loan to get this new loan. Correct. And then when the foreclosure notice shows up, because the fraudster never had any intention of paying the loan back, Now the homeowner gets a loan notice for a half a million dollar loan to an entity that they didn't even know existed or to a person that didn't know existed for an amount of money double what they thought they owed on their house. Wow. When there is a recognition of fraud, is it clear that the owner is the real owner? How does that process work? So let's say somebody took a loan on that house for a half a million dollars and they forged the name. how much time does it take for the court system to recognize that you are the owner and that there is this fake transaction to the bank and you have to argue with who has to pay for the 500? Yeah, sure. That's a great question. Sometimes it's very easy to recognize. It's very easy when there's absolutely no relationship between the homeowner and the fraudster. So that sometimes it's very easy. It's very quick, but it takes time to go through the legal process. And the reason why you have to go through the legal process is because, as I mentioned before, you have a title insurance company that's on the hook to pay. They've insured that title. They've insured that loan. So they think they've insured a bona fide transaction. So even though the insurance companies, I'm not here to give a title insurance opinion, but even though insurance companies then have that risk and that exposure, they still need to make sure they go through the process to find out, do they really owe the money, right? So that's what... So they're going to try to fight it. They're going to fight it. That's what takes the time. Sometimes the initial identification of fraud happens pretty quickly. Let me give you an example of what happens all too often and where you have a more difficult time is when you have a family member stealing from a family member. Wow. So for example, homeowner is in place. They have a relative. Oftentimes it's a a son, grandson, granddaughter, daughter, could be a nephew, but somebody that's in the relative family chain. And the person that's the owner doesn't have capacity to make decisions. So as we all know, they can exercise a power of attorney. And they use their family member to then take care of their financial affairs. So they've executed a proper document. And now the family member takes the power of attorney and uses it to transfer title from their family member to them or to another entity. Go out, leverage the asset, take a loan, spend the money. Foreclosure notices show up. Other family members get wind of it because the person who signed the power of attorney doesn't understand what's happening. They get wind of it and say, hold on a minute. You weren't supposed to ever do this or get this loan. Well, the loan's been taken out. Money's been spent. foreclosure notices are happening right and now it's it was it a fraud or was it not a fraud did they use a document that looked legitimate that was legitimate or did they take a power of attorney document and then make changes to it now you have a real fraud so it's a difficult thing to tell really hard to tell when you have the family involved and unfortunately it's a very sad situation but these types of issues with the with the family members happen a lot all too often do you see a rise in the number of cases absolutely um since the uh what i will say the economic crisis in 2008 time frame depending on what year you want to say it started this has happened quite a bit and the reason is is because so many homes that were foreclosed and so many distressed assets that were sold in the marketplace across the country, it created another industry, if you will, for investors and lenders. A great industry, an industry that provides for a very good need to help distressed owners. Unfortunately, the bad guys found a way to use that industry to have loans made that shouldn't have been made, right? So you have the middlemen fraudsters that took advantage of this inventory of distressed assets, if you will. Since that time period, I have seen the numbers just continue to increase. The case volume just continues to increase in terms of what's taken place. There are literally groups of fraudster families, if you will, that do this for a living. And they can get away with it? Yes. Can you tell us about that? These are stories that seem hard to believe, but there are groups of family members, usually from out of the country, not always. There are U.S. citizens that are participating, but have family members outside of the country, and they understand the industry. They get entrenched in the lending industry. They get entrenched in the brokerage industry, and they learn what they can do to fool the industry. and and then take the money and send it overseas and so they borrow the money and then they send it overseas correct and there are um pockets of those of the sort of what i would say are family or family related um in you know groups throughout the country that do this so it's it's a it's a pretty unfortunate and they borrow from the banks or borrow from the banks a lot of what i see outside of the banks is the private, the hard money lending industry. They're targeted because hard money lending, which again, a lot of my clients are hard money lenders. I do a lot of work with them and it's a great industry. It fills a great need. But the idea with hard money lending is that the loan is made based on the equity available in the asset. And so they're a target for a fraudster to obtain funds because they'll pitch the deal as if, look, this is a low risk because it's such a low loan to value. And one of the things I do when I advise lenders is slow down and take a look at what you have before you move forward. Because it's easy when somebody's acting with urgency, there's usually a reason. It might be that there really is a distress. And that's very true. But the fraudsters are acting with urgency because they want to get the transaction done before they're caught. You have been in the banking space for 25 years and I think you're still in the banking space in a way. Yes. What is it like for you to see all this fraud? You know, I sometimes feel like I'm a little jaded because as I mentioned before, when I was working for a bank for 25 years, I knew it existed. As a bank officer, as someone underwriting and approving loans, we needed to be aware of risks and we needed to be aware of what could occur. I just didn't see it because I was exposed to all the loans in the banking industry. When I left and started my own consulting business and started consulting for banks and consulting for lenders, and then got into the litigation consulting side as well, it's almost all I see now. And so, because that's what I specialize in. So what I see now is almost 100 percent of the deals that have gone bad that that nobody recognized them as bad and and that's the scary thing about it is that you can have all of the right people in place you can have all the right intentions in place and yet fraud occurs and um and and i and so that's why i have so many stories because i've seen so many of these cases and i and i do it nationwide you know so from all coasts New York to California it happens in all states and and so I do get a little jaded because now as I say before and I don't take it lightly sounds funny but people have their houses stolen and and that's all I see whereas when I was in banking for 25 years I knew about it but never really had any personal experience in loans I managed where that happened but now I see it all the time everyone should know about this at least they can do something about it but there on the title insurance or maybe have some way of monitoring the title of the, besides knowing about it, do you have any other recommendations for state leaders or government officials? Is there a way to deal with this? Well, I would say this, and again, I'm not an expert in the political side of things, but from what I see in the industry, different municipalities handle, or different counties, I should say, handle the way title is recorded and the way properties are transferred. For example, some of the counties that I work in will allow electronic filings for recordings. Some counties want original documents to be delivered to the office themselves, right? So it's different. It's different. And I don't know how that gap gets bridged, but in my opinion, and consistency helps. When there's inconsistencies from how San Diego County does it versus Riverside County versus L.A. County, it's a real problem. For example, a lot of the cases that I have is you'll have a home in Riverside County, and there'll be a deed transferred, and then the bad guys make a mistake, and they'll record it or have a document recorded in L.A. County. That's hard to catch, but if you don't catch it as a lender, you can be in a position of making alone now on a document that should have never even been recorded. And it's because sometimes the recording processes, and I'm not being critical of any of the counties, I'm just saying they're different processes. And when they are different and not consistent, it's hard to detect. So there needs to be some consistency on this, and there needs to be some attention brought to this. In my opinion, yes, more attention and more consistency. If you want to do a nationwide search on real estate, for example, it's very, very difficult if you have no idea where somebody might own a home because I have to search all the different counties. There are some online services that are trying to do a better job to provide information, but it's an imperfect system still because it's statewide and then broken down by counties. And each state has different rules and each state has different rules on how recording priority happens. HOAs and what they can do in Nevada is different from what an HOA can do in California, for example. There's inconsistency across the states and across the counties. I've seen stories as crazy as I had one situation. Somebody took out a loan against a house in a fraud scheme, as I mentioned, similar transfer title, did all the things, pulled $3 million out. And they actually had video surveillance of the bad person. It was almost like a bad TV show. Had an overcoat on and a hat. And she pulled up to a dealer in, I want to say like a pawn shop, but a nice pawn shop, let's say. And opened up the back of her car and pulled out a million dollars in gold. Wow. Yeah. It's on surveillance, you know. somehow was able to trade that but it came from them the loan that she took out they never found her uh they all they know is that she left the country and in a case like that did the homeowner end up losing everything or was there any insurance or any there was insurance um there was a settlement most of the settlements when they occur are confidential even yeah even for me when i'm on the case even but there was a settlement in that particular case that was a free and clear home in that particular case and the homeowner was living somewhere else and had not been living in the home for several years and somebody else came in and took her identity took out the loan and actually again it was confidential but sold the sold sold the home to one of the reality tv personalities who is a home flipper and there are many of them so i'm not giving out any yeah secrets here it just so happened someone who's been on tv doing this type business got tricked bought the house started to do renovations and the real homeowner showed up and said what are you doing what are you doing in my house so what do you mean it's my house and uh so at the end of the day of course the the person that was the that also had been tricked clearly didn't want to take from the true owner and so they were able to work out a settlement with the title company and the lender and the true owner wow to to be able to so it has to be a lot verification when you're even buying a home you need to make sure you have clarity who's the owner correct in that case there was no loan for the fraudster the fraudster's benefit was the sale proceeds so the fraudster took ownership and sold it the buyer bought the house the buyer took the loan took the loan yeah so it's like a tricky situation yeah so you mentioned for the banks You mentioned there's a lot of wire fraud. Correct. But because there's not a clear consistency. So what happens? A typical scheme, and there are many, so I'm not here to try to tell you all of them, but a typical scheme that most people are aware of is when email is intercepted. So someone gets into the system, and we all know about password protection and so forth. We're educated on that for the most part, but it still happens. So what happens is somebody gains access, they are able to gain access to a password to gain access to your email, to whatever system you're using. And then what they can do then is change the direction of the email so that when an email is sent to the valid address, it then goes to the middle man, to the middle person. They intercept the email and they can then send the email back. And oftentimes those emails have one digit difference. yeah one little thing just one little it looks like it looks the same so the sender sends an email with a request for a wire then the receiver is the bad guy the receiver then sends here is where you send the wire then the sender who sent the original email doesn't detect that it's coming from somebody else they wire the money they wire the money without verification and that's the problem is that with as much knowledge that has been out in the world regarding wire fraud, people still wire money without verifying. Without calling. You got to do the call. You got to do the call. I get cases to this day where even there are professionals that don't make the phone call. You'd be surprised. And professionals that should be making the phone call all the time anywhere from licensed real estate personnel across the country and I'm not picking on anybody or any industry I'm a licensed broker to escrow officers to their professional people in the industry that should know better still to this day unfortunately participate in the wire fraud by not taking the step of of calling and this can happen with the texting some people think if I text instructions, it's okay. It's not true. Some of the bad guys are able to intercept that. They look for keywords. They just want to find out, is somebody talking about wiring money? There's our target. Other targets are CEOs of businesses. Why? Because CEOs of businesses are busy and don't check sometimes as closely as they should because they're busy. And so the fraudsters know that. So that's another target to intercept email. And it's unfortunate, but it's billions and billions of dollars. Jay Heibert, it was really a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for coming and telling us about all of this. And make sure to come back and update us. We would love to hear from you on California Insider again. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Tell us what you think about this conversation with Jay. Have you seen cases like this within your friends and community. And what would you do if you were in this situation? Make sure to email us at [email protected] or comment. We read all of your emails and comments. I'm Siamak Ramezani. This is California Insider. We'll see you next time.