DANI Venn feels like she’s stuck in a spinning vortex and can’t get out.

The former MasterChef contestant and her family are stuck in their worst nightmare — homeless, financially stressed and unsure what their future holds.

Her young family fell victim to a cruel scam that saw hackers swipe $250,000 that had been earmarked for their new home.

Recounting what has been a “horrific” past week, Venn said her family’s desperate attempts to get their money back had taken a stressful toll on her and husband Chris.

“This past week has been horrific. I feel like I’m just spinning in a vortex and I can’t get out,” she told A Current Affair on Tuesday night.

“This is our life savings here, we’ve got two small children, a four-and-a-half-month-old, and a three-and-a half-year-old.

“You just can’t do this to people.”

Venn has been forced to bunk in a room with their kids at her mother’s house while her husband is camping out in a caravan.

“You feel embarrassed, you feel bad for everybody else that you’re having to put out and that you’re having to ask for help,” she said.

“It could happen to anyone buying or selling a property.

“We’re being treated like criminals, like we’ve done something wrong. We haven’t done anything wrong other than put faith in the system.”

That system involved using the software system PEXA (Property Exchange Australia), the nation’s new online property transfer system, to settle the home they bought. But that’s when thieves managed to hack their way in.

On June 18, a hacker compromised PEXA by getting into their conveyancer’s email account, pressing the ‘forgot password’ button, intercepting the email to create a new password, logging in, and creating a new user.

The hacker then changed the bank details of their transfer to another bank account.

The couple can’t settle the property they bought and have been left paying $500 a day in contractual penalties.

If they don’t come up with the $120,000 they need to finalise the purchase by the end of this week, they’ll lose the home and their deposit.

The Commonwealth Bank has been able to freeze $138,000 of the stolen funds, but $110,000 is still missing and is not recoverable.

PEXA offered to loan the outstanding cash after Venn threatened to go to the media but there were strict conditions including paying the money back whether their insurance claim was successful or not.

PEXA would also put a caveat on their new property and stipulated Venn would have to stop criticising the company in public.

“They won’t give us back our money unconditionally and all we want is for our own money back,” she said.

“We’re not going to get it back unless we fight for it.”

“We have values and ethics and we’re not breaking them because they don’t want the public to know what’s going on.

“We want to make sure this doesn’t happen again to anybody else. No one deserves to be in this situation.”

It will soon be mandatory for all property transactions in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia to be carried out through this software, as the state governments sell-off traditional Land and Title Offices.