What Buyers Really Mean by “Operational Maturity”
December 15, 2025
Rental fraud isn’t new—but it is evolving. And in 2025, it’s smarter, faster, and harder to catch than ever before. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed nearly every industry, and multifamily housing is no exception. On one hand, it’s a game-changing tool for automating operations, verifying income, and catching bad actors. On the other? It’s giving fraudsters a new digital toolkit—one that’s already reshaping the nature of rental scams across North America.
That’s the key takeaway from Snappt’s latest research. In its “2024 Fraud Report: Data, Trends, and Strategies for 2025,” Snappt—a fraud detection solution for property management—analyzed nearly 5 million documents and found that 6.4% of rental applications contained manipulated or fraudulent information. That equates to over 80,000 forged documents in just one year. While that’s a modest improvement over the 7.9% fraud rate seen in 2023, the risks remain alarmingly high.
And the stakes? They’re not just operational—they’re financial. A single fraudulent tenant can result in thousands of dollars in lost rent, legal fees, eviction costs, and property damage. In high-turnover cities where demand is fierce and leasing decisions are made fast, that damage can scale quickly.
AI: The Double-Edged Sword
AI has become both a weapon and a shield in the battle against rental fraud. On one side, it empowers property managers to streamline operations, speed up applicant screening, and detect document manipulation with unprecedented precision. On the other, it’s arming fraudsters with new and increasingly sophisticated tools to bypass those very defenses.
Fraud is no longer a static threat—it’s evolving in real time. What once took hours of manual editing can now be done in seconds with AI-powered tools. Today’s scammers aren’t just tweaking PDFs—they’re generating entirely synthetic documents that mimic authentic pay stubs, bank statements, and employment records with remarkable accuracy. Logos are pixel-perfect. Data is contextually accurate. Even metadata, which was once a telltale sign of forgery, can be convincingly replicated.
With just a few clicks, bad actors can inflate incomes, fabricate job histories, or erase red flags from financial records. The result is a new kind of fraud: faster, harder to detect, and capable of slipping past traditional screening methods unnoticed.
For property managers and leasing teams, this means one thing—your fraud prevention strategies must evolve as quickly as the threats you face.
Snappt’s research identified three primary methods used by fraudsters, each with its own digital twist:
Specialized software—sometimes open-source, sometimes sold on dark web marketplaces—is used to generate entirely fake documents. These tools are increasingly AI-enhanced, making it easy to spoof logos, financial formatting, and metadata.
This tactic involves taking real documents and subtly editing the details—changing income figures, adding zeros, or swapping out employer names. The goal? A document that passes a cursory glance but fails under scrutiny. AI tools can now make these edits so seamless they’re nearly impossible to detect without advanced forensics.
It may sound amateurish, but this old-school trick is still in play. Fraudsters tweak documents using different fonts or mismatched alignment—mistakes that trained fraud detection systems can catch. Ironically, these “human” errors are sometimes the very thing that flags an otherwise flawless AI-generated fake.
Geographically, rental fraud isn’t evenly distributed. Snappt’s data reveals that some cities and states are getting hit harder than others—driven by everything from economic conditions to housing demand.
Top 5 U.S. Metros with the Highest Rental Fraud Rates in 2024:
The geographic data hints at broader socioeconomic patterns. Markets with higher rent burdens, lower income stability, or a more transient population are particularly vulnerable. In many cases, desperate renters are turning to desperate measures—and some fraudsters are even selling forged documents to others trying to game the system.
AI-powered document detection is quickly becoming table stakes in the industry. But just as fraudsters are using AI to enhance their deception, property managers must do the same to fortify their defenses. According to Snappt, properties that use digital fraud detection tools reduce fraud-related losses by up to 70%. Yet, adoption isn’t universal.
Some property managers still rely on manual verification—calling employers, checking bank statements line by line, or “going with their gut.” In 2025, that’s a recipe for risk. Not only is it time-consuming and inconsistent, but it also opens the door to human error—and AI-driven forgery is built to evade the human eye.
Instead, property managers need to modernize their defenses with a multi-layered approach—one that blends technology, process, and human awareness.
Here are four proven strategies to help multifamily operators outsmart fraud in 2025 and beyond:
Deploy tools that go beyond the surface. The best solutions scan for deep anomalies—metadata inconsistencies, image layering, and subtle digital fingerprints that indicate tampering. This allows teams to flag suspicious documents in seconds, not days.
Manual calls to HR departments or scouring bank statements are error-prone and time-intensive. Instead, leverage secure APIs that can verify employment status and income directly from payroll systems or financial institutions in real time.
Fraud doesn’t just show up in documents—it shows up in patterns. Applicants who submit forms at odd hours, revise financial info repeatedly, or bypass normal communication channels may be worth a closer look. Behavioral analytics can help identify these red flags early.
Even the best tech can’t replace trained eyes. Equip frontline staff with regular training on how today’s scams work—everything from mismatched fonts and fake domains to AI-generated guarantor videos. Awareness is your first line of defense.
Together, these strategies form a holistic fraud prevention framework—one that balances speed with scrutiny, automation with accountability, and protection with peace of mind.
Looking ahead, the tug-of-war between fraudsters and fraud-fighters will only intensify. Generative AI tools are improving rapidly, and synthetic identity fraud—where real and fake data are blended to create an entirely new digital persona—is on the rise.
At the same time, AI-based fraud detection systems are getting smarter. New models trained on massive datasets can detect the subtlest of manipulations. Some are even using deepfake detection algorithms to catch forged video or audio evidence in co-signer applications or guarantor videos.
The takeaway? In 2025, property managers need to think of fraud detection not as a one-time task—but an ongoing arms race. As technology evolves, so must the tools, policies, and people that guard the gate.