James J McDonald - Verona, NJ

While buying a house in Montclair, NJ, I was recommended Jim McDonald's firm. During the initial weeks, Jim worked quickly to get our house under contract. A week before closing, I was emailed by someone posing as Jim's assistant asking for a wire transfer for the remaining down payment. The email looked exactly like all the emails I had received previously from his assistant and had the same writing style and also cc'd my real estate agent and bank lender. This person also sent back financial documents when I asked for them. It was clear that Jim's assistant's email was hacked into and monitored the previous months because they had a whole history of our communications. Because of all this, I didn't suspect anything and sent the wire transfer of $166,000. The next months were the most stressful months working with law enforcement to try to recover the funds. I didn't hear much from Jim or his assistant during this time. They actually continued to email me when they knew their account was hacked and monitored by a hacker. They only stopped using email when I specifically requested to do all communication via phone since their emails were probably still being monitored by the hacker. After working with the NY District Attorney, FBI, and my bank, we were finally able to recover most of the funds. The Secret Service also confirmed that the law firm's account was hacked and that they needed to upgrade their system and educate their employees about phishing scams. When I told this to Jim, he denied it and even had the gall to BLAME ME for sending the wire transfer. Buying a house is a stressful and emotional experience. According to the FBI and Secret Service, this wire scam has been happening more recently with mortgage transactions because of the large amounts of money being passed around and the vulnerable positions of the buyer to try to get everything right. A 2 min informative discussion in the beginning from Jim about this type of scam would have been a simple best practice and would have prevented this whole mess. To conclude, I would definitely not feel safe working with Jim and their compromised email systems, especially with all of your life savings and financial information being involved. They hardly EVER return phone calls and emails (even before the wire fraud), and had the gall to blame me, their client. They still deny anything happened to them. I just worry for their current clients and anyone willing to work with them. There are a billion real estate law firms that pretty much do the same work. It's not worth the risk to work with Jim's firm with your precious life savings.