TECHNOLOGY
Consumers urgently need to educate themselves about the risks involved in making financial transactions online because scammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated .
Unfortunately , the perpetrators of these online crimes are incredibly intelligent and are constantly updating their methods to make it harder to spot the difference between a legitimate and a fake communication or website . The groups that are most vulnerable to cyberattacks are the elderly , individuals who do not use the internet regularly , those who rely on public and open WiFi networks for internet access and – increasingly , those operating in the real estate industry .
Easy targets in Real Estate
The real estate industry is particularly vulnerable to fraudulent activity because of the large sums of money that are regularly exchanged in the process of buying and selling a property .
One type of cybercrime that we ’ re seeing more frequently in recent years is that of scammers posting an advertisement online for a property for sale or rent . These scammers have no actual relation to the property in question and after an unsuspecting buyer or tenant hands over the cash , they vanish into thin air .
Phishing is another type of cybercrime commonly experienced in the real estate sector . The term describes a cybercrime perpetrated by an individual or groups who contact potential victims posing as legitimate institutions to lure them into providing private data . This data includes banking and credit card details , passwords , or personal identification information .
In a real estate context , this commonly takes the form of a cybercriminal hacking into the real estate company ’ s system to study the language used in its
144 NOV 2022 SA Real Estate Investor Magazine