Posts with tag 'real estate scams'

You may be wondering why your real estate agent has been asking for identification when you are considering listing your property. It's a fair question and one we are pleased to answer.

There have been more and more frequent scams where an alleged scammer (criminal) poses as a seller and engages a real estate agent over the phone to talk about selling a piece of land, house etc. Since so many transactions are done virtually and using the assistance of e-signatures, a person can easily pretend to be a seller, get a property listed and then go about getting the proceeds from the "sale". They do all this, while posing as the seller. In fact, many of them will use an email signature that may even be the sellers name and more. This is a sophisticated scam and to help protect you, we are now asking for sellers to share with us their driver license or another form of identification. It is the only way we can verify you are the real seller. Since so many of the documents we require are publically available, using an ID is the best way we have to protect you. If you have any questions about this, feel free to reach out to one of our agents and they can talk about it with you more.

To explain the scam more, here's our VP of Sales & Marketing, Chrissy Smith:

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