Dani Venn, a Masterchef finalist from 2012, and her husband Chris Burgess have been the subject of a terrifying hacking scheme that has left their family homeless.
Venn, who now runs a successful food blog and content creation company, and her husband, had $250,000 stolen from the sale of their home in Smiths Gully on the outskirts of Melbourne, while the process was being settled in an online property transfer system run by PEXA (Property Exchange Australia).
The hackers reportedly added themselves as extra users to the transaction, deleting email evidence of the act, which allowed them to steal the money anonymously. The PEXA system reportedly does not require proof of identity of verification to add new users.
The situation, which unfolded on Monday, has left the family homeless, as they no longer have enough money to settle on the home they recently bought on the Mornington Peninsula.
“We haven’t been able to settle on the property. We stand to lose our deposit of $80,000 and the new house. We are also getting charged interest of $500 a day on a default notice until we can come up with the money,” she told The Age.
“You trust the system, you trust the banks. But PEXA has claimed no liability and neither has the CBA. I’ve really lost trust in this process,” said the 32-year-old.
“I feel I want to pull out all my money from the bank. I don’t trust these big corporations. They don’t care about ordinary Australians.”
The family is currently living in a single room in a relative's home, as they attempt to get their money back.
PEXA has not released an official statement but has addressed the situation in the Frequently Asked Questions section of their website.
"On Monday 18 June, at approximately 5pm, PEXA was made aware of a fraudulent situation where a practitioner’s email account was compromised," wrote a representative for Property Exchange Australia on their website.
"In this instance, an unknown party intercepted a change-in-password email sent from the PEXA platform which in turn allowed this person to access the Subscriber’s PEXA account. As a result, the destination account details in the settlement schedule were fraudulently changed," they continued.
Dani Venn and Chris Burgess are parents to three-year-old Harlow, and five-month-old Oscar.
Top Comments
Never heard of PEXA. Did they have a conveyancer? I prefer to deal with people as opposed to computer systems when dealing with things like property sales/purchase. Although human errors can occur, they generally don’t result in this type of situation. I hope they recover their lost funds ASAP, buying and selling houses is stressful enough without this type of $hitty scenaio added to the mix!
Yes, they did have a conveyancer (mentioned in another article about this story). The conveyancer creates an account within the PEXA system and the transfer is all done electronically. The upside when it works is that the funds are transferred instantaneously. I was the vendor in a transaction last year and the purchasers wanted to use PEXA so my conveyancer asked me if that was ok. I had never heard of it either but thought, why not? (Although it costs a bit extra too because the govt charges a fee!) Luckily for me it was all very smooth and worked perfectly, which I think is the case in the vast majority of PEXA transactions. In this case, it was the conveyancer’s email system that was hacked, which enabled the hackers to add themselves as a user within the transaction and divert funds to their account.