When a land title company in Missouri checked its bank account, it found it short by $440,000. Seems that someone had logged into its account at BancorpSouth and wire-transferred the funds to some strange entity’s bank account in the Republic of Cypress. Now the escrow and title company had never done a wire transfer like that. It had never done an international wire transfer. It had never wired money to Cypress, and had never done any business with the strange entity known simply as "Brolaw Services." The transaction was entirely fraudulent.
In what has become a trend in this area of law, the federal Magistrate ruled that, when it came to bank fraud, the merchant was essentially on its own, writes Legal Columnist Mark Rasch. The answer was for the merchant to have better security, not for the bank to have better alerting procedures. The case involves the interplay between fraud, risk, loss, law and technology. Unfortunately, in this case, fraud wins.