E&O Insurance Coverage for Title Agents, Abstractors & Escrow Agents

The short answer, as many attorneys well know, is “Of course.” This is America. And as wonderful as it is to live and work in this country, it is also an easy place to be sued. For example, we all know about frivolous lawsuits connected to closed real estate transactions. A party to this type of transaction dislikes their present situation, finds a willing attorney, and sues every party involved in the transaction, including the title or closing agency (sues them for what?). My personal rule of thumb is to celebrate anytime one of these suits can be dismissed for less than $10,000 in attorney fees—because most of the time it ends up costing quite a bit more. Unfortunately, a disgruntled current employee, former employee, or rejected job applicant does not even need to find a willing attorney. They can report the alleged discrimination, based on race, gender, age, or any other federally protected status, to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). If the EEOC finds cause for a lawsuit during their preliminary investigation, as it seems they frequently do, they will sue your company. Keep in mind that many states, such as New York, have additional protected statuses. While your company may not have experienced such a suit in the past, I urge you to prepare. The old guard of experienced title professionals are retiring, and growing title companies frequently turn to new and non-traditional hires to fill out their workforce. While many of these newer hires will be […]

When faced with the prospect of paying more for their own insurance, many title agents find a reason to not purchase Cyber coverage insurance. Is this a wise choice? Here are a few of the scenarios when paying more for insurance would save thousands of dollars of expenses and also minimize the distraction to your team. Time spent dealing with an unexpected Cyber claim is time not spent developing the business. An email address in your company is hacked, and criminals scroll through that inbox, collecting information while covering their footsteps. Most states would require you to then notify everyone whose personal information was in that inbox, from clients, to vendors, to partners. Cyber insurance could pay for those notification costs and a PR consultant to help your business mange negative press about the incident. A malware, accidentally downloaded by an employee, locks all computers on your network and threatens to delete all your information and files. If your information is not backed-up in real-time, you might need to pay the ransom in order to preserve the continuity of your business. This could especially be true if you have several large transactions that need to be processed immediately. An employee mistakenly calls the number listed on an email to verify wire instructions for a mortgage payoff, instead of the number on file. The employee confirms the wire instructions with a criminal impersonator and wires $100,000 to the wrong account. Because the mortgage still needs to paid-off for the transaction to […]

Fraudulent or faulty wire instructions from cyber criminals are affecting title professionals and closing agents across the United States. Here are two scenarios to consider: A title agent receives revised closing instructions from the seller/seller’s representative. The title company verifies the new closing instructions/wire routing numbers and wires the funds. A few days later, upon the buyer calling to ask where the money is for closing, it is discovered that the new wire instructions were fraudulent and the wired money is gone. The buyer of a house receives an email from a representative at their title/closing agency, giving them wiring instructions for their down payment. They wire the money per the instructions. When they eventually meet with the title agency, they find their money never arrived. The email they received containing wire instructions was fraudulent and the money is gone. The title company’s email had been hacked by cyber criminals. Insurance is available to protect the title agency/closing agent, but getting it is not as simple as adding a “wire fraud” endorsement to your policy. Here is what you need to do: Have a written, company-wide practice of verifying all wire instructions and revisions by phone. This includes reading the account number of the new wire and receiving verbal verification. This verification process is a warranty for most wire fraud policies, meaning that if you don’t do it, there will be no coverage. Purchase both Fidelity/Crime coverage and Cyber insurance coverage, and have a Wire Fraud endorsement coverage added to [...]

Do you have an action plan in place in the event one of your company’s email accounts is hacked? A recent incident with a Midwest-based title and settlement agent is prompting us to alert our clients to this issue. The particular company had several email addresses that handled a large number of files, for example, closings@abctitle.com. Unbeknownst to the title company’s tech team, and their third-party managed service provider, this email address had been hacked. Every time an email was sent from this account, a BCC (blind carbon copy) was also sent to an out-of-network email address. For several months, all the closing and banking information sent from the main account was also sent to an unsecured, unknown account. Once the title company discovered this breach, they were required, by state law, to notify each person whose information was unknowingly sent to this unsecured email address.This notice was required for everyone in the company’s database who could have been affected, whether or not the leaked information had been used, and was required to be completed within 30 days of the data breach being discovered. The title company never found out who received the unsecured emails—or if the responsible parties ever made any attempt to profit from the stolen information. The cost for these required notifications is $336 per person/record, on average, for the financial services industry and $274 per record for the generic services industry (according to the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study by Ponemon Institute). Bear in mind, […]