Fundingshield Market Alert – How UBER, Equifax & Yahoo data breaches have increased fraud risk in the US mortgage market

Recent news shared that UBER has had a massive data breach of roughly 60 million accounts. While there has been the leaking of PII such as name, address, and driver’s license numbers, it has yet to be reported that the leakage extended to trip location histories, credit card numbers, bank account numbers and other Personally identifiable information (PII) .


December 6, 2017 Newport Beach, CA: Fundingshield is a financial technology company that protects the Mortgage, Real Estate, Title and Legal firms from wire fraud, social engineering attempts, cyber based and settlement agent wire fraud.

 

IkeIke Suri, Chairman & CEO of Fundingshield, Commented,“For the mortgage industry the UBER breach is specifically troublesome as the Driver’s License is one of the primary means the industry uses to validate Identity. With the loss of a large base of driver’s license numbers, adding into the mix Equifax, Yahoo, Paypal and several other breaches, ample opportunities for the injection of fraud into the home lending process have been created. New schemes have been noticed by our loan level transaction services the Wire Account Verification Service(WAVs) and the Guardian loan closing certification.”

 

William KlumperWilliam Klumper (Bill), Senior Advisor to Fundingshield, Vice Chair of Residential Governance at MISMO and a longtime mortgage banking CIO/CISO shared,

“We recently saw the effect Equifax had in helping to perpetrate fraud as reported by IPERSÔÇöIowa Public Employee Retirement SystemÔÇöwhere criminals were able to successfully get IPERS to divert retiree checks to different bank accounts through the use of Equifax breach data.”


The problem for the mortgage industry is how to protect the integrity of the transaction throughout the lifecycle of the loan where numerous third-party data breaches are extending the range and type of fraud which can be committed within mortgage lending.

William added, “ There are a number of vulnerable parties including smaller settlement agents, Attorney’s, the home buyer and seller and smaller lenders who may not have the sophisticated fraud detection systems which includes software to detect basic email spoofing and EAC/BEC. This will by its very nature make the lending process more difficult, increase overhead within the entire industry and could open up the industry to additional regulatory security or claims around ECOA and potentially UDAAP claims depending on how we respond.”

While the industry deals with validating identity one of the core fundamentals of Fundingshield’s approach on closing and settlement verification has been our transaction level analysis. Fundingshield looks at the loan closing details, parties, documents and then uses a multi-level data factor analysis to arrive at a pass or fail decision empowering our clients to operate their business with a knowledgeable partner.

Fundingshield has several solutions that lending, title and legal entities can leverage in addition to home buyers to assure that their closing dollars or down payments are going to authorized accounts. Ike Suri added, “The company is currently developing its consumer facing solution and is collaborating with on block-chain initiatives with industry leaders.”

Our Services Include:

  • Service Provider Compliance (SPC) – Third party service provider and vendor oversight automation system for pre-close, closing and post-close service providers:
    • System designed to meet enhanced standards by the OCC to manage all vendors and create a live approved party list according to a lender’s, asset manager’s or investors own compliance requirements. The system automates document collection, compliance checks and audits as well as provides access to partners such as warehouse lenders, TPOs, brokers, correspondents, construction partners and more.
  • Guardian Service – A loan closing transaction level monitoring system that provides a loan level certificate of assurance confirming good settlement, valid CPL coverage, wire account confirmation (using our WAVs system), approved and authorized closing parties, licensing of agents and more on every closing.
  • Wire Account Verification Service (WAVs) – Customers can leverage wire verifications instantly from our proprietary dataset of over 40,000 verified settlement party wire accounts.

We look forward to being in touch and presenting our services in person or via a Webex. Please contact Sales@FundingShield.com or call +1 (800) 295 0135 x2 to speak with our sales and management team.