Real estate deed fraud and seller impersonation are nothing new. Deed fraud is essentially as old as real estate ownership records. What’s new in 2026 is who will do it and how.
That’s the view of Brian Maughan, EVP and chief innovation and marketing officer at Fidelity National Financial, the title insurance giant whose brands include Chicago Title, Fidelity National Title, Commonwealth Land Title, Alamo Title and National Title of New York.
The fraud schemes he’s currently monitoring are more operational than opportunistic, using the same artificial intelligence tools that real estate agents use to write property descriptions.
“These types of plans are becoming more organized, leveraging more technology, and becoming more sophisticated,” Morgan told Inman.
The good news: Of the roughly 4 million residential real estate transactions last year, only a small percentage involved deed fraud, Mohan said. The bad news is that that percentage is becoming increasingly difficult to catch.
“All fraud is bad,” Morgan said. “It’s a problem whether you have 12,000 transactions or just one, but it’s not a universal problem. I want real estate agents to understand the scale of it.”
easiest target
Morgan says the two transaction types that appear most frequently in his company’s fraudulent activity are vacant land and unclaimed property.
The data backs up Mohan. According to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Deed and Title Fraud Survey of real estate association leaders, vacant land accounted for 62% of title fraud cases reported in the past year, while owner-occupied homes accounted for just 12%. Single-family homes accounted for just 16% of reported cases.
The pattern is consistent. Scammers go where no one is looking.
The logic isn’t complicated. Vacant lots don’t have residents knocking on doors to check on them. Absentee owners (out-of-state second home sellers, long-distance landlords, owners who don’t watch the MLS) create a similar distance between the true owner and the transaction. This separation is what scammers need.
“If I’m a real estate agent and someone comes to me and says, ‘I want you to help me sell this vacant property,’ my automatic reaction would be, ‘Okay, I listened.'” Morgan said.
He cited a recent example. It was a vacant lot in Arizona, the owner lived out of state, but no one knew the property was listed. A scammer contacted a local real estate agent and posed as the seller, attempting to force a transaction.
Without intervention, the agent would have had no reason to suspect anything. The contact information provided by the scammer matched the listing and there were no visible issues.
The problem was discovered when the title company matched the contact information provided by the “seller” with other public data sources such as addresses, phone numbers, and emails that were not provided by the seller. Discrepancies surfaced, the actual owner was contacted, and the transaction was closed.
“There is enough public information about the seller that someone could impersonate you,” Morgan said. “And if I’m an avid real estate agent looking for a property and I don’t do my own due diligence, it’s really important to have a title insurance company that knows how to do it.”
How trained eyes caught deepfakes
Deed fraud is also moving into territory that would have been science fiction a few years ago.
Remote online notarizations, which allow closings to occur via video without being present in person, have become vectors for fraud. In one case Morgan described, drawn from a collection of recent similar transactions, two people showed up to a notary call, presented government IDs that passed an automated verification check, and appeared ready to sign.
The stories they told, the details of the property they knew about, the documents they had, everything was laid out. One of them then stood up and the deepfake video became distorted.
“Deepfake technology allows us to destroy images,” Morgan said. “And if there is a disturbance in that image, the processor doesn’t have the ability to hide it.”
A trained employee noticed. They asked the signatories to perform a series of physical movements aimed at stress testing the AI overlay, including placing their hands in front of their faces, taking off their glasses, and standing up. That image kept getting destroyed, and the “seller” turned out to be AI-generated.
“Employees quickly realized it was an AI-generated overlay on top of the video call,” Morgan said. “The scammers knew the story, they knew the property, they had fake IDs. But this employee caught them.”
He noted that creating fake IDs has also become easier. The combination of fake IDs passing automated checks and deepfake overlays for video calls means some scams are designed to defeat standard digital verification stacks.
Human judgment, backed by pattern recognition built by observing many transactions, captures them.
“This is just one example of how bad actors are leveraging advanced technology,” Morgan said. “They’re becoming more comfortable with the technology, so they’re becoming less dissuaded from the idea of impersonating someone on a video call. It doesn’t happen every time. But if you go to a title company that’s never seen this before, you don’t know if you’re going to benefit from their expertise.”
low tech version
Not all incidents involve cutting-edge technology. Some resort to the oldest trick in the book: forged signatures from known and trusted names.
In another recent example shared by Mr. Morgan, a deed was recorded on a vacant property, not as part of a sale, but merely recorded. Ownership had changed on paper with no transaction behind it.
When the property finally went through the title company’s due sale process, the underwriter, who was investigating a series of titles, noticed something unusual. It was a document in which ownership changed without a bill of sale attached.
The notary seal on the document belonged to a local notary public that the title company staff knew personally. They called her and she said it wasn’t her signature.
“I know the notary, so I’ll call them. Is this your signature? And they’ll go, no,” Morgan said. “Notaries with local expertise immediately raised the alarm.”
3 things real estate agents should know
Morgan’s advice for real estate agents isn’t complicated, but they need to slow down.
First, acknowledge that the problem is real, even if it is not universal. Most transactions are not susceptible to deed fraud. But such things can destroy relationships with clients, and the attempts are becoming increasingly sophisticated to the point that agents without strong title partners don’t even notice them coming.
Second, realize that the technology that enables fraud is advancing faster than most agents realize. AI makes it easier to put together a convincing backstory about a property owner, and deepfakes make it possible to pass video notarization.
The cost of producing fake IDs has become cheaper. The scammer who tried to sell vacant land in Arizona was likely a lone thief who operated based on public records. Those attempting it today may have organized staff, software toolkits, and playbooks built from dozens of previous attempts.
Third, and this is the most immediate part of Morgan, is choosing the right title partner. He admitted he was biased, but the argument was structural. Title companies that process transactions across multiple states are seeing fraud that a purely local business might never encounter. If something new surfaces in Florida, the plan could be shared in Northern California before making its way to the West Coast.
“The best defense is the partners you work with,” he said.
Morgan said older homeowners and long-time property owners are especially concerned. To impersonate a seller, you need an actual property. That means people who have owned their homes for decades are natural targets.
According to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, Americans 60 and older reported $7.7 billion in fraud losses last year, an increase of about 60% from the previous year. This is nearly double the $4.6 billion total reported by victims in their 30s and 40s.
“If I were a real estate agent, I would be very cautious if I was working with someone who has owned the property for a long time and is probably not really familiar with this process,” he said. “Please do your due diligence. Please help them.”
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