Wire fraud — how deposits actually disappear
The most common way foreigners lose money in a Mexican purchase — and the one control that reliably stops it.
Wire fraud is the most common way foreign buyers lose money in a Mexican property purchase, and it almost never looks like fraud at the time.
The mechanics are always the same. Somewhere in the chain — the seller’s side, an agent, sometimes the buyer’s own inbox — an email account is compromised. At the moment a deposit is due, wiring instructions arrive from a familiar address, formatted like every other message in the thread. The account number is the only thing that has changed. The money lands in a mule account and is gone within hours. Banks recover almost nothing, because the buyer authorised the transfer.
The control that stops it is procedural, not technological: wiring instructions are verified by calling a number obtained independently — from the firm’s website, from a prior in-person meeting, from anywhere except the email that carried the instructions. That is check 30 of our protocol, and it is done on every transfer, every time, without exception.
Two related controls close the rest of the gap: funds move only through a genuinely neutral escrow agent — not the broker, not the seller’s lawyer — and they sit in segregated, insured accounts rather than anyone’s operating account (checks 28 and 29). Escrow is not standard practice in Mexico, which is exactly why it has to be imposed deliberately.