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By Nashville Indiana Title Company
The One Wiring Detail to Double-Check Before You Send a Dime You've got the wire instructions open on your laptop, your bank's transfer screen ready in ...
You've got the wire instructions open on your laptop, your bank's transfer screen ready in another tab, and the amount from your Closing Disclosure typed in and confirmed. You're about to move the biggest chunk of money you may ever move at one time. Before you hit send, stop and do one thing: call our office, on a phone number you already trust, and read the account and routing numbers on those instructions out loud to a real person here.
That's it. That's the detail. Verify the wiring instructions by voice, using a number you already had, before a single dollar leaves your account. Everything else in this post is why that one habit matters more than any other step in the funding process.
When you're funding a Brown County closing, the money goes into an escrow account we hold for your transaction and nobody else's. The instructions that tell your bank where to send it are just numbers on a page or in an email. And numbers on a page are exactly the thing that gets tampered with.
The scam that targets real estate money doesn't look dramatic. It looks like an ordinary email that seems to come from your title company or your agent, sent near your closing date, with updated wire instructions and a friendly note about a change in banking. The account and routing numbers have been swapped. Everything else looks right. The logo, the signature line, the tone. If you follow those instructions without verifying, the money lands in someone else's account, and wired funds are very hard to claw back once they're gone.
The FBI and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau both flag this as one of the more common ways homebuyers lose money at the closing table. The CFPB has a plain guide on that's worth five minutes before you move anything. It says the same thing we do: verify by phone, using a number you already know, not one printed in the email that gave you the instructions.
Here's the part people skip. They do call to verify. But they call the number printed in the same email that has the instructions. If that email is fraudulent, so is the number, and the person who answers will happily "confirm" the fake account.
So the number you call has to come from somewhere else. The card we handed you at the office. Our number on the courthouse square listing. The number your agent gave you the first week you started working together. Any source that existed before the wire instructions showed up. When you reach us on that line and read the numbers back, you'll know you're talking to the actual title company holding your escrow, and we'll confirm the account digit by digit right there with you.
This takes about two minutes. Nobody here will ever be annoyed that you called to check. We'd rather field that call fifty times than watch someone lose their earnest money or their full down payment to a swapped account number.
Our instructions don't change at the last minute. If you get an email late in the week saying our banking details have been updated and here are the new numbers, treat that as your cue to pick up the phone, not to update your transfer. A genuine change on our end is rare, and if it ever happened, we'd walk you through it on a call, not spring it on you by email the day before closing.
We also won't ask you to rush. Part of moving money safely is not being pushed. The scam relies on urgency, on making you feel like the closing falls apart if you don't wire in the next twenty minutes. Real closings don't work that way. If someone's pressuring you to send funds fast and skip the verification call, that pressure is itself the signal to slow down and call us on your known number.
If you're buying a wooded lot near Brown County State Park or a cabin off a gravel road, and you're doing it from Indianapolis, Cincinnati, or Chicago, you may never set foot in our office until the day you sign, or you may sign remotely and never come in at all. That's completely normal here. Plenty of our closings are with people building their next chapter from a distance.
The tradeoff is that everything reaches you by email and phone instead of across a desk. You don't get the in-person handoff where you already know the faces. That makes the verification call more important, not less. When your closing coordinator sends funding details, save our office number the moment we first talk, and use that saved number to confirm the wire before you send. You get the same protection a walk-in buyer gets, you just build it yourself with one call.
Read your Closing Disclosure for the amount, so you know the number is correct. Pull up the wire instructions. Then, before you type a single digit into your bank's transfer screen, call our office on a number you already trusted from an earlier conversation and read the account and routing numbers back to us out loud. We confirm. Then you send.
That's the whole thing. One phone call, on a number you already had, before the money moves. It's the cheapest insurance in the entire transaction, and it's the one step we'd never want you to skip on your way to owning a piece of Brown County.