Scammers Figure Out Trick to Steal Houses Using AI

"As technology evolves more and more and more, I wouldn't be surprised if we see this more and more and more."

Steal Estate

Wherever you stand on AI, it's undeniable that the tech has supercharged fraudsters. Not many of these AI-enabled scams, though, can claim to be as audacious as trying to swindle entire houses from their owners.

Marty Kiar, a property appraiser in Broward County, Florida, says that scammers nearly pulled off such a scheme by trying to con a local title company, or a firm that helps ensure the legal transfer of property rights.

As NBC Miami reported last month, the scheme began when a woman who claimed to be the owner of a vacant lot contacted the firm saying she wanted to sell it. After some resistance, she agreed to get on a live video call to verify her identity.

But whoever showed up, it wasn't the real owner. While a woman appeared on video, it turned out that this was an AI-generated deepfake designed to impersonate a woman who was reported missing years ago.

"It was all AI imagery," Kiar told Business Insider. "What I'm really fearful of is, as technology evolves more and more and more, I wouldn't be surprised if we see this more and more and more."

Easy Mode

Title fraud isn't new. Since property data is public, anyone dedicated and unscrupulous enough can gather the information, like transaction records and deeds, to pull off one of these cons.

But AIs can do all that work and synthesize the information together at unparalleled speeds, making a scammer's job more effortless than ever.

"They're just creating these AI models that are reading all of the public records and public data that they can possibly get their hands on, that are then creating a means by which they can manipulate that information," Tyler Adams, CEO of the wire fraud prevention company CertifID, told BI. "So it's like the ingestion is now automated because of AI models, and then the impersonation is a lot more sophisticated."

Malicious Mimics

Criminals have come up with all sorts of creative ways of abusing AI tech. Many involve impersonating someone like a family member, like in an increasingly common scam in which a deepfaked voice will call someone claiming to be their relative, saying they've been kidnapped and need ransom money.

We've even seen someone use AI to impersonate President Joe Biden in robocalls to potential voters, telling them not to vote. That prompted the Federal Communication Committee to swiftly ban unsolicited robocalls that use an AI-generated voice.

These are just a few forms that AI con jobs can take, though, and we're likely to see these scams continue to evolve to pernicious new heights.

As far as title theft goes, Kiar says his office has only seen two scams that involved AI. But from the way he puts it, this is just the beginning. "The criminals are very, very smart," Kiar told BI. "They're going to use the most up-to-date technology to try to scam somebody out of their property."

More on AI fakery: The AI-Generated Product Reviews Choking the Internet Are Now Illegal