What we buy, what we run, and what we do not do

Rental fraud is two different problems that get discussed as one. There is the scam aimed at renters, where somebody copies your listing and collects a deposit on a house they do not control. And there is the fraud aimed at you, where an applicant manufactures an identity or an income to get through screening. They need different defenses, and most of the ones that work are bought, not built.

The FTC recorded roughly $65 million in reported rental-scam losses since 2020, with about half of the scams in the year ending June 2025 starting on Facebook. That figure is money renters lost. On the owner side, the National Apartment Association found that 93% of the multifamily operators it surveyed had experienced fraud in the prior twelve months, up about 40% year over year. That survey covers apartment operators rather than single-family landlords, so read it as direction rather than as your number.

The part that is actually ours

Four things. None of them is detection.

• We do not override a fraud decline. When screening flags an applicant, that decision stands. We either accept it or we do the work to confirm the person is who they say they are. We do not talk ourselves into a tenant because a unit has been sitting. No software sells this, and it is the part that protects you.
• We pay for screening past the basics. Every applicant runs through a third-party service on top of the screening our management software already includes. That is a line item we choose to carry. Most managers stop at the bundled product, and the bundled product is a paperwork check.
• We run the strict configuration. The anti-fraud screen on our self-tour system is an option, and it is one most managers leave switched off.
• We watch your listing for copies. Every night, on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, against the addresses and rents we actually manage.

That is the honest shape of it. The reason it is worth anything is the standard behind the purchase. In Andrew's words, after the incident further down this page: "We had to secure vendors who did the outbound research for us, and didn't use PM companies like us as the guinea pigs for their software." We have a documented bar a tool has to clear before we will rely on it. That is the differentiator, not the brand of the tool.

What the screening we buy actually does

The thing that separates real screening from a credit report is where the numbers come from. Income is verified by connecting to the applicant's payroll provider or bank account and reading the source, not by looking at an uploaded pay stub. Document analysis exists as a fallback for applicants who cannot link an account, and that ordering matters: a payroll connection cannot be forged the way a PDF can, and there is now a small industry selling convincing fake pay stubs.

On identity, the check that matters is a timeline. A synthetic identity is a fabricated person built on a real Social Security number, often taken from a child or someone deceased. Because the number is real, the credit file comes back new but clean, and a normal credit pull passes it. The catch is the mismatch: a number issued 23 years ago that shows only 14 months of activity tied to that name and date of birth is not a person who has been alive for 23 years.

Applicants are also matched against history at other properties in the vendor's network, and eviction records are pulled from court filings with the outcome verified rather than scraped from a database.

Every method has a bypass

This is the part most fraud pages skip, because it concedes something. No single check works. Layering is worth doing only because the bypasses do not line up.

An applicant trying to get through has to defeat a payroll connection, a network-history match, an identity timeline, and a check at the door, each of which reads a different source. That is the whole argument for a stack, and it is also the reason no stack is a guarantee.

Where we have no defense, stated plainly

This section is here because a page like this is worthless without it.

• We do not detect fraud ourselves. The identity and income work belongs to the service we buy. We choose it, run it strictly, and abide by it.
• We run no wire-fraud or title-fraud detection at all. What we do there is advisory, and it is at the bottom of this page. You are the target on both, not us.
• We have never had a cloned listing taken down. The nightly scan is real and a person reviews what it flags. It has not yet produced a confirmed copy of one of our listings, and we are not going to describe it as more than monitoring.
• We do not independently verify a prior landlord. If an applicant names one, we get what the screening service returns. We do not separately check the county record to confirm that person owns the address they claim.
• We stopped watermarking listing photos. We used to. We do not now, and this page said otherwise until August 2026.

The incident that changed how we do tours

A prospective tenant called us asking where the keys were. They had found one of our listings re-posted on Facebook, sent a deposit to somebody with no connection to the home, and signed a lease emailed from a free Gmail address. They had already been inside: the scammer had recruited someone locally to pull the keys from the lockbox and leave them in the mailbox so the "tour" would go ahead.

Our lockbox vendor at the time verified identity lightly at booking and never confirmed that the person at the door was the person who booked. We changed vendors. Identity is now confirmed at the door and not only at the booking, which is the specific hole that attack went through. A self-tour system with a weak identity gate is worse than no self-tour at all, because it gives a scammer a faster way in.

Wire fraud and deed theft, where we only advise

These are owner-side problems. We run no detection on either, and we would rather say that than imply coverage.

On wires: confirm instructions by phone using a number you already had, not one from the email. Forward rather than reply, so you re-type the address. Verify the receiving account name with your bank before sending, and call to confirm receipt. Treat any last-minute change in wiring instructions as fraudulent until proven otherwise, and treat urgency as a warning sign.

On title: carry an owner title policy that explicitly covers forgery, fraud, and impersonation. Check the Shelby County Register of Deeds for your parcel periodically to confirm the deed still reflects you. Watch for misaddressed mortgage statements or tax bills at the property, which are often the first sign. Memphis has live examples, including an April 2025 arrest for filing fraudulent deeds claiming to have bought three Memphis homes for ten dollars each.

Quick answers

The return numbers in any rental analysis quietly assume none of this happens to you. A bad placement, a fabricated identity, a stranger touring your empty house, somebody collecting deposits on your address. When one of them does happen, the owner carries it. Our job is to keep that assumption true more often, and to be straight with you about the parts we cannot.

Sources: FTC Data Spotlight, December 2025. National Apartment Association application-fraud research, December 2024 (multifamily operators). Last reviewed August 2026.