CertifID According to an October 2023 survey from CertifID, 54% of real estate professionals reported having experienced at least one seller impersonation fraud attempt within the past six months. Meanwhile, 77% of real estate professionals surveyed claimed to have seen an increase in seller impersonation fraud attempts within the same period. Seller impersonation fraud, a scam where a fraudster uses publicly available records to impersonate the owner of a vacant or unoccupied property to benefit from the sale, represents a major threat to U.S. property owners. 

The U.S. Secret Service issued an advisory earlier in the year on this type of threat. Stephen Dougherty, a financial fraud investigator at the organization, recently shared that "we started seeing these vacant land scams or seller impersonation scams going back to last fall, and it’s been increasing ever since." Dougherty added that the scams are "highly organized. You need people to launder your money. You need people to be doing your research in terms of the properties that [they] want to attack.”