March 3, 2018
I am writing this from my house in Costa Rica. When I retired, we (Mike) swore we would never own real estate again. But as I noted in my last post, Mike started making noises about staying here. We both liked it and were getting more and more comfortable. We started to make friends. We found favorite beaches and rivers and jungle trails and birds and flowers and spent lots of time visiting them. We remained living onboard Magda Jean at Marina Papagayo, pretty much by ourselves but for the occaisional transient cruiser.
One day, while indulging my hobby of reading real estate ads, I found one of those too-good-to-be-true ads and showed it to Mike. Because it was so cheap and because it was in an area of Costa Rica we had yet to explore AND we needed to go to San Jose anyway and it was on the route . . . we made an appointment to see the place.
We did not buy the house. It was a wreck. Only one area was even close to being finished, which was the kitchen, half bath and a party area. It looked like a bachelor pad in the 70's - hideous red painted wood paneling, smoked glass cabinet covers and red cabinets, weird lighting, a huge pool table, and a very nice piano, wrapped in shrink wrap. The pool table's claim to fame was that it had been purchased from one of the members of Three Dog Night who needed the money for heroin. The seller assured me he had papers proving the pool table's "provenance." Regarding the piano, the seller told me proudly the "keys had never been unlocked." It looked like a really nice piano, but I pondered the: (1 availability of a piano tuner in Costa Rica, even San Jose; and 2) whether said piano tuner would be willing to drive several hours (a good part of it on dirt roads) to the house to tune said piano. I decided that even considering the pool-table -with-awesome-provenance and the never-unwrapped-piano, I would have to pass on the deal. Plus - the seller was really sketchy and I wouldn't buy a coconut from him.
After we got back to the boat, we decided that if we wanted to buy a house, we really needed to contact Mike's cousin. We didn't want to give up Magda Jean, but the idea of having a home base was appealing. We were still not sure what we wanted to do as far as cruising was concerned, and although living in the marina was fun, it was very hot and a little bit lonely. We were no longer a part of the cruising community - as much as we ever were really a part of it - yet we had no community on land. I don't think this was Mike's motivation - but I was feeling it. I did know he was the first to suggest taking this seriously, this idea of getting a place in land here in Costa Rica.
Rene, Mike's cousin, has been selling real estate in Costa Rica for 25 years. We decided we didn't need a beach home because we had the boat. Plus, it is very hot at the beach and we'd have to use AC all the time. We like the area around Lake Arenal. (Side note: I really preferred the Volcan Turrialba area, but that volcano is erupting so that turned out to be a bad idea.) Arenal is cool, the countryside is gorgeous, and although it is pretty rural, Costa Rica is not a big country and it doesn't take too terribly long to get to stores and things like that.
Rene emailed be a bunch of places in the area that matched what we said we wanted. I sorted through them, and was ble to eliminate two thirds of them, for various reasons. We then got together and discussed he ones left, and finally arrived at seven that we wanted to look at. I was pretty excited about it - I never thought I'd be buying house in a foreign country. Very very cool.
We looked at the most expensive place first - it was really out of our reach, we would have had to scramble a lot to raise the money. We next saw the cheapest place - too much work. When we got to the place we ended up buying, Mike jumped out of Rene's car and said "This is it!"
You would think things would end there, but things got really crazy. I almost don't believe it myself and I was there.
As the process to buy the house went on, emails flew quickly and furiously between us, Rene, the escrow agent, the sellers, and a couple of lawyers. Mike and I were happy how smoothly things were going. We transferred our down payment to the escrow with no trouble. Everything was pura vida, as it should be.
Eventually, it was time to make the transfer of the balance of the payment for the house to the escrow agent. A few days before we planned to transfer the money, the escrow agent sent new wiring instructions. We thought that was strange, since the new bank was in Eastern Europe. We aren't stupid, so we emailed Rene and the escrow agent. Rene thought it sounded weird, but then emailed us that it was the seller's choice. Since everyone had assured us that this was the way to go, we initiated the transfer.
A couple of weeks later, the escrow agent started sending me emails asking when the transfer would go through. I called our bank and was informed the transfer was complete, and gave me some confirmation numbers, which I provided to the escrow agent. He kept insisting there was something wrong with the transfer. I was getting irritated, so I gave up emails and called him. I told him, "look, it was your idea to send the money to Slovakia or where ever it was." He pauses a second and then said "I never did that." "Yes you did" I said, and I'll prove it. I'll send you the email." So I hung up the phone, called up the email and forwarded it, and then called him. I almost threw up when he said "I never sent that email."
You guessed it. It was a huge scam. The scammers infiltrated the email of either the agent or the escrow or the attorneys and as soon as the word "closing" came up, they sprang into action, and re-routed the money. The money was gone.
I called the bank - they were horrified and immediately put their security on it. I couldn't blame them - they only did what we told them too. After a few days, the bank told me there was no more they could do.
I called the FBI. After being told they could neither affirm or disaffirm whether the matter would be referred to an agent, I actually got a call back. The agent was awesome, and even though she told me I wsa pretty much SOL, I felt better. She told me they get calls about this sort of scam every day, in her office alone. She said the scammers were very good, and none of us involved were moronic rubes, which is what I was thinking about myself.
The sellers still wanted to sell us the house, and we had money in the bank from the first transfer for the down payment. We upped the down payment, and came up with an agreement that suited us all. The sellers still get to use the house six weeks each year, for the wind surfing season. We also got to know each other during this process, and are still good friends.
A day or so after signing all the related paperwork, we were eating lunch at a restaurant when my cell phone rang. That itself is rare, no one ever calls us. It was the bank in San Diego. The guy there told me "you are not going to believe this, and we didn't either, but your money came back. All of it." After I finished crying and thanking him for the good news, he told me the bank had no idea why it came back after all the time it was gone. It showed as though the account number was wrong or some bounce back like that. I called the sellers and the agent with the good news, but they wanted to keep our new deal in place, wihch was fine with us.
After this was all over, we all got together and compared the emails sent to and fro during the process. Each one of us had been hacked, with fake messages taking the place of real ones. They didn't make spelling or grammatical errors in the fake emails, and it was sort of beautiful how it all went down. I still have no idea how or why the money was returned. The escrow agent called the bank in Eastern Europe and complained bitterly because his name was on the fake account. My FBI agent told me they did reach out to contacts in the banking world there.
So in March 2016, we moved into our house. It was sold fully furnished, down to the last napkin and pillow case. (Luckily for us, the sellers had great taste.) We have an acre of land, with a front view of the lake and a back view overlooking the countryside, looking towards two volcanos. These views are incredible, and they change every day depending on the weather. Our backyard abuts a private 80 acre game preserve, of which we own a share. We are woken up every morning by howler monkeys, and toucans and arikaris are daily visitors. We also have coatis and agoutis, and beautifully colored squirrels. It is very windy up here (hence it is a wond surfer's paradise) and there is plenty of excitement during the rainy season.
So - that brings us up to one year ago. I am going to stop here, and will catch up to the present the next time I sit down to write this. Once that happens, my blog may take a new turn, since I am no longer a full time live aboard. We'll see.
"There is nothing so stable as change." (Bob Dylan
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