Property deed fraud and seller impersonation aren’t new. Deed fraud is essentially as old as recorded property ownership. What’s new in 2026 is who’s doing it — and how.
That’s the view from 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 watching today look less like opportunists and more like operations, and they’re using the same artificial intelligence tools that real estate agents use to write listing descriptions.
“These types of schemes are becoming more organized, they’re leveraging more technology, they’re becoming more sophisticated,” Maughan told Inman.
The good news: Out of roughly four million residential real estate transactions last year, Maughan said a very small percentage involved any deed fraud at all. The bad news: the percentage that does is getting harder to catch.
“All fraud is bad,” Maughan said. “Whether it’s 12,000 transactions or one, it’s still a problem, but this is not a universal problem. I’d want real estate agents to understand the scale.”
The easiest targets
Maughan says two transaction types most often appear in the fraud attempts his company flags: vacant land and absentee-owner properties.
The data backs Maughan up. According to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Deed & Title Fraud Survey of real estate association leaders, vacant land accounted for 62 percent of title fraud cases reported over the past year, while owner-occupied homes made up just 12 percent. Detached single-family houses represented only 16 percent of reported cases.
The pattern is consistent: Scammers go where no one is watching.
The logic isn’t complicated. Vacant land has no occupant to knock on the door and verify. Absentee owners — out-of-state second-home sellers, long-distance landlords, owners who haven’t been watching the MLS — create a similar distance between the real owner and the transaction. That separation is what a fraudster needs.
“If I were a real estate agent and I saw someone come to me and say, ‘Hey, I’d like your help selling this vacant land,’ I should automatically be thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve got my ears up,'” Maughan said.
He walked through a recent example: A vacant lot in Arizona with an owner living out of state, where no one had any idea the property had been listed. A fraudster contacted a local real estate agent, posed as the seller, and attempted to push the transaction through.
Without intervention, the agent would’ve had no reason to suspect anything. The contact information the fraudster provided matched the listing, and there was nothing visibly wrong.
What caught it was a title company cross-checking the contact information the “seller” provided against other public data sources, such as addresses, phone numbers and emails that hadn’t originated with the seller. The discrepancies surfaced, the actual owner was reached, and the transaction died.
“There’s enough public information out there about sellers that someone could pretend to be you,” Maughan said. “And if I’m an eager real estate agent who’s looking for a listing and I don’t go through my own due diligence, it’s really important that you have a title insurance company that knows how to do this.”
How a trained eye caught a deepfake
Deed fraud is also moving into territory that would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago.
Remote online notarization, which allows closings to take place via video without in-person attendance, has become a vector for fraud. In one case that Maughan described — drawn from a composite of similar recent transactions — two individuals appeared on a notarization call, presented government IDs that passed automated credential checks and seemed ready to sign.
Everything lined up: the story they told, the property details they knew, the documents they had. Then one of them stood up, and the deep fake image was distorted.
“When you have a deep fake technology, you can disrupt the image,” Maughan said. “And if there’s any disruption in that image, the processors aren’t equipped to cover that up.”
A trained employee noticed. They asked the signers to run through a series of physical movements — putting hands in front of their faces, removing glasses, standing — designed to stress-test the AI overlay. The image kept breaking, and the “sellers” turned out to be AI-generated.
“The employee realized pretty quickly it was an AI-generated overlay on the video call,” Maughan said. “The fraudsters had the story down, knew the property, had the fake IDs — but this one employee caught it.”
Fake IDs, he noted, have also gotten easier to produce. The combination of fabricated identity documents that pass automated checks and a deepfake overlay for the video call means that some fraud attempts are now engineered to defeat the standard digital verification stack.
Human judgment, backed by pattern recognition built from seeing many transactions, is what catches them.
“That’s just one example of how bad actors are leveraging sophisticated technology,” Maughan said. “They’re becoming less deterred by the idea of impersonating someone on a video call because they’re more comfortable with the technology. It doesn’t happen every time. But if you go to a title company that’s never seen this, I’m not sure you’re going to get the benefit of that expertise.”
The low-tech version
Not every case involves cutting-edge technology. Some rely on the oldest trick in the book: a forged signature from a known, trusted name.
In another recent example that Maughan shared, a deed had been recorded on a vacant property, not as part of a sale, but simply recorded. Ownership had changed on paper without any transaction behind it.
When the property eventually came through a title company’s process for a legitimate sale, underwriters reviewing the chain of title noticed the anomaly: a document that changed ownership without a sale attached.
The notary seal on that document belonged to a local notary whom the title company’s staff knew personally. They called her, and she said it wasn’t her signature.
“I know the notary, so I’ll just call them. Is this your signature? And they go, nope,” Maughan said. “That local expertise — well, I know that notary — flagged it immediately.”
3 things real estate agents need to know
Maughan’s advice for real estate agents isn’t complicated, but it does require slowing down.
First, acknowledge that the problem is real, even if it’s not universal. Most transactions aren’t touched by deed fraud. But the ones that are can destroy a client relationship, and increasingly, the attempts are sophisticated enough that an agent without a strong title partner won’t see them coming.
Second, recognize that the technology enabling fraud is advancing faster than most agents realize. AI makes it easier to compile convincing backstories on property owners, and deepfakes make it possible to pass a video notarization.
Fake IDs have gotten cheaper to produce. The fraudster who tried to sell that Arizona vacant lot was probably a lone actor working from public records. The one trying it today may have an organized crew, a software toolkit and a playbook built from dozens of prior attempts.
Third — and this is where Maughan is most direct — pick the right title partner. He’s biased, he acknowledged, but the argument is structural. A title company that processes transactions across multiple states sees fraud attempts that a local-only operation may never encounter. When something new surfaces in Florida, it can be shared in Northern California before that scheme reaches the West Coast.
“The best defense is the partner you work with,” he said.
Elderly homeowners and long-tenured property owners are a particular concern, Maughan said. Seller impersonation requires an actual property to impersonate, which means people who’ve owned homes for decades are a natural target pool.
Americans 60 and older reported $7.7 billion in fraud losses last year, a roughly 60 percent jump from the prior year, according to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report. That’s nearly double the $4.6 billion reported by victims in their 30s and 40s combined.
“If I’m a real estate agent, I would just be really cautious if I’m working with someone who’s owned a property for a long time and maybe is really, really unfamiliar with this process,” he said. “Do your due diligence. Help them out.”
