Imagine you are moving. After weeks of showings, tours, scrolling through online listings, detours to look around the neighborhood, handshakes, forms and meetings with the bank — it’s finally time to buy the perfect house.
The closing date is at the end of the week, and it’s time to send in the down payment. You receive a phone call from someone at the real estate agency, giving you specific instructions on where to wire the money. You hit send, and pour a glass of champagne to celebrate.
At the end of the week, you get a call from your real estate agent asking when you will send the down payment. Confused, you explain that you spoke to someone in that office — only to learn that the money was never received.
In this hypothetical scenario, you are the victim of wire fraud.
Scams like this are not hypothetical for many people today, and they are especially common in real estate. The spread of AI technology like deep fake videos, voice manipulation and even AI-generated email copy are making these scams even more sophisticated. Scammers can scrape information, audio, video and images from websites and social platforms to impersonate trusted industry professionals. According to the California Attorney General, imposter scams were the most commonly reported fraud in 2023.
Preventing scams, like the hypothetical one above, is the primary focus of real estate tech company Closinglock. When founder Abigail White had a brush with an email fraud scam, she and her husband decided there was something they could do about it, so they created Closinglock.
Today, the real estate tech company simplifies and secures the real estate closing process, and has protected more than $350 billion for clients across the United States.
Built In spoke with White about the story that eventually became Closinglock.
What prompted you to start the company?
In 2017, while I was working as the marketing director for an Austin-based real estate team, one of our buyers received a phishing email and almost wired away their down payment.
That evening I told my husband, Andy, about the day’s excitement and he was shocked the wire information had been shared via email. We looked back at our recent home purchase, only to realize we had received our title company’s wire documents through an email and trusted them blindly. That night, we decided that we could — and should — develop a system that would update and revolutionize the title world.
Who did you look to for inspiration early on and why?
Andy has always had an entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit, so he viewed starting a business as a challenge. His father owns an electrical engineering firm, so self-employment was not a foreign concept to him. At the time we didn’t have any children, so our entire lives revolved around Closinglock for a couple of years.
I did not have any experience with starting a company or self-employment, so the whole concept seemed daunting to me. Whereas Andy saw everything as an adventure and a problem to solve.
What pushed you to keep going during challenging periods?
Andy and I have a great rapport; if he is feeling frustrated, I can usually bolster his mood, and vice versa.
Also, we are grateful to our friends in the real estate industry who continue to let us pick their brains and ask questions.
What’s next?
Updates, upgrades and additional features!
Real estate fraud is constantly evolving, so we’re always focused on outpacing emerging fraud schemes with new products and features. And while security is paramount, we’re also placing an emphasis on simplicity and convenience, which is long overdue in the real estate transaction space.
To solve these problems, we’re hiring across all functions (sales, marketing, customer success, engineers, product, general and administrative — you name it). Lots of exciting things are in progress!
