With a red hot market and more closings than you can count, it’s hard to keep an eagle eye on every last detail. You spend so much of your day focused on reading the fine print of transaction documents that it can be hard to keep track of the clients themselves. Now, with technology improving, you might have transaction clients that you’ll never need to meet in person.
When a client visits in person, your experience in practice might indicate that something is not right with the information presented (although not always). Yet as practice moves online, fraudsters can take advantage of the anonymity that the internet brings.
Real estate fraud online may not be obvious as fraudulent activity, and a fraudulent identification can be difficult to verify. The imperative is on you, as counsel, to do full due diligence when it comes to KYC, or ‘know your client.’ Seeing a client through a webcam and a scanned ID makes it difficult to tell if that license or passport is fraudulent or has been altered in any way.
Real estate lawyers have the ultimate responsibility for making sure that the transaction runs smoothly, and they are the ones responsible for distributing proceeds from a transaction. If you participate in a transaction that turns out to be fraudulent, you and your practice may be held liable for the fraud.
If you practiced real estate law before personal computers and the internet, you remember the days of doing everything by hand, from title searches to registrations, and the time and effort each step of the transaction used to take. Today digital signatures have changed the game completely.
Today your clients no longer have to be within a short drive from your office. They can participate in a transaction from anywhere in the world!
Buyers and sellers in a small town are no longer restricted to using the same lawyer! Clients who live in remote areas can now gain equal access to big city legal services without travelling far.
A client no longer needs to interrupt their workday to catch you during yours. They can sign and execute documents at their convenience so long as they meet any deadlines.
Even if your client hands you a physical ID it can be hard to verify, and it’s that much harder over a webcam. A smarter digital signature uses technology to verify your client’s ID for you.
With a basic digital signature you can never tell who’s actually signing on the other end. A smarter digital signature uses blockchain technology to make sure your document stays in the right hands.
If you do get tied up in an identity fraud, your practice and your license can be at risk. Taking extra measures not only protects your clients, but protects your business as well.
With a basic digital signature, you might save your client the time of the commute, but the risks can sometimes outweigh the rewards. If you’re dealing with a large-scale transaction on a high-priced property, you want to be sure of every step of that transaction, and that includes identifying your client. Even if you’re comfortable assuming that the right person is at the keyboard, it’s never worth having doubts about whether they’re using a valid ID.
At Vaultie, our goal is to align digital signatures from the top down. We’ve designed a product that functions to the highest security standards, and one that serves to protect both your clients and your practice.. With advanced technology available at your fingertips, there is simply no reason to mistakenly facilitate a fraudulent transaction. Our goal at Vaultie is to make client identification easier, one signature at a time. Contact our team today to learn more or set up a demo.