If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take another brief interlude into the topic of fraud. Our story today features a young couple eagerly anticipating the purchase of their first home. After their offer on the house was accepted, the couple received an e-mail from their realtor with the seller’s bank account information. They planned to wire their down payment, so this didn’t seem suspicious at all. Unfortunately, when the wire was made, the money never reached the seller. Instead it ended up lining the pockets of the hackers who had broken into the real estate agency’s computer network.

  A subsequent investigation found that the e-mail had in fact come from the agent’s account, but he was not the one who had written the message. Like sharks circling the water, the hackers had simply monitored the different transactions until the perfect victims were found. What specific criteria did our victims possess? Their deal was about to close, a high down payment was involved, and the money was going to be wire-transferred. Using the anonymity of the Internet, the criminals found the perfect getaway. As soon as the money had reached the hacker’s off-shore bank account, the account closed and the hackers disappeared forever. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently expressed, “the Internet contains no boundaries from country to country.” The comment was meant in a positive way, but the knife cuts both ways.

  To put into perspective just how many people are looking for ways to steal your money electronically, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen recently said in a congressional hearing that more than one million malicious attempts are made every day to gain access to the IRS computer systems. This may seem like an exaggeration, but the point is well-taken. For every couple looking to a buy a home, or business looking to buy a funeral vehicle, there are innumerable thieves looking to quickly dash those dreams and disappear into the night.

  This article is not meant to scare, only inform. The Internet is a wonderful thing that has opened up the world to us. Access to information, like no other time in history, is at our fingertips. The Internet is an incredible dynamic tool, whose capabilities are still being explored and expanded.

  HearseHub.com is our endeavor of bringing a very unique marketplace to the Internet. A place where a funeral director can easily shop a plethora of funeral vehicles from the comfort of their office. HearseHub has been in operation for over 4 years and has had over 184,355 vehicles viewed through the website.