An elderly woman has been robbed of more than half a million dollars after scammers pretended to be her settlement agent and convinced her son to transfer cash into a bogus account.

The 83-year-old woman was one of six people targeted by similar cyber attacks in the last two months.

She was trying to buy a property in the western suburbs when it is believed scammers intercepted emails between her son, who was acting on her behalf, and her settlement agent.

An email asked for $558,000 as the final payment for the property to be transferred into an account.

By the time the son realised it was fake, it was too late, with just $1,000 left in the account.

In late August two clients of another western suburbs settlement agency lost $25,658 after emails were intercepted, and three payments towards property purchases were sent to scam bank accounts.

On September 13, another western suburbs agent and property manager had her account hacked.

Three prospective tenants received emails saying their applications were successful, and transferred a total of $7,300 into the accounts.

Consumer Protection commissioner Dave Hillyard warned agents to be on alert.

"We need to get to the bottom of this sort of stuff, we've got to alert the community, and more importantly back to the industry, to say you're got to really ramp up your security settings on your emails," he said.

A similar scam almost netted $200,000 from a father and son buying property south of Perth earlier this year, but they noticed the email address was slightly different to their agency's.

Perth residents have also been targeted after fraudsters successfully changed contact details of properties of South Africans living overseas, and then attempted to sell the properties.

In 2010, a man had his Karrinyup home sold for $485,000 while he was living overseas.

An Auditor-General's investigation into the regulation of the state's real estate industry in 2015 found there was "sound" oversight in place, and the risk of direct financial loss remained low.

The head of WA's real estate institute also urged agents to be more careful, but stopped short of calling for greater regulation of the industry.

REIWA President Hayden Groves said the industry already had strict regulations in place.

"As property managers they undergo strict and daily banking reconciliations … so there already is very strong regulation for the real estate industry in holding other people's monies," he said.

"I think more regulation is probably impossible, because the sophisticated nature of these phishing scams and these fraudsters is such that more regulation and more compliance … I don't think makes a difference."