Weekly Real Estate News
The National Association of Realtors has launched a new fraud-prevention resource for agents and brokers as artificial intelligence, impersonation schemes and payment fraud create more ways for criminals to penetrate residential real estate transactions.
The new NAR resource, “Protecting Your Clients and Your Business From Fraud,” was released Oct. 1. NAR said it is designed to help practitioners prevent, detect and report fraud throughout a transaction rather than treating fraud as a closing-table problem.
The association cited FBI data showing individuals lost $275 million to real estate fraud in 2025. NAR also warned that AI is making voice cloning and impersonation more convincing, increasing the importance of independently verifying identities, payment instructions and unusual requests.
Fraud risk now spans the transaction
NAR organized the resource around prevention, detection and reporting. Its prevention guidance addresses identity verification, secure communications and controls around funds. Detection materials focus on red flags that can surface as a transaction progresses. The reporting section gives practitioners steps to take when suspicious activity or an actual loss occurs.
That structure reflects how real estate fraud has evolved. Wire diversion remains a major risk, but agents and brokers can also encounter seller impersonation, fraudulent listings, identity theft, altered payment instructions and increasingly sophisticated social-engineering attempts.
The association says practitioners should be particularly alert to changes in wiring instructions, urgent requests that bypass normal procedures, inconsistencies in identity documents and communications that attempt to move a transaction outside established channels.
AI raises the cost of relying on familiar signals
Generative AI can make fraudulent messages more polished and voice cloning can make an impersonator sound like a known client or business partner. That weakens some of the informal cues practitioners once relied on to spot scams.
NAR’s response emphasizes process over intuition: verify people and instructions through trusted contact information, protect account credentials, limit unnecessary sharing of sensitive data and escalate suspicious activity rather than assuming an unusual request is legitimate.
The $275 million figure cited by NAR represents reported individual losses tied to real estate fraud, not the total economic cost of every attempted scam. As with other fraud statistics, unreported incidents and prevented attempts are not captured in reported-loss totals.
For brokerages, the practical issue is operational. Fraud prevention increasingly depends on whether transaction procedures make independent verification routine before money or sensitive information changes hands. A convincing email, text or phone call is no longer enough.
NAR’s new hub consolidates those practices in one place for members. It arrives as fraud and cybersecurity have become recurring transaction risks for brokerages, title companies, lenders and consumers—and as AI makes some of the oldest scams considerably harder to recognize.
