At this year's NARPM Annual Conference, Boom CEO and co-founder Rob Whiting talked about a problem every property manager has, whether they've spotted it or not: rental application fraud has gotten a lot better, and most screening hasn't kept up.
Here's a recap of his session.
A pay stub that passed every visual check
Rob started with a real example. An applicant sent in a pay stub from a well-known insurance company. The formatting was clean, the gross-to-net math worked and the year-to-date totals were consistent. Most landlords would have approved it after a quick look.
The file itself told a different story:
- It was created at 2:21 p.m. on 8/6/2025, nine minutes before the applicant hit submit.
- The pay date was two days in the future.
- The metadata showed it came from a script, not a payroll system.
- The Social Security number on the stub didn't match the one entered on the application.
- Every year-to-date figure was exactly 16 times the current period, with no variation in hours, withholding or benefits.
None of that shows up on the page, and that's the core challenge for rental housing right now.
How common is it?
On Boom's platform, 12.9% of applicants submitted at least one document flagged for fraud. Between 2/1/2026 and 9/30/2026, 7.3% of submitted documents were rated high-risk and another 6.1% medium-risk.
Fraud isn't an edge case. The tactics have simply moved faster than most screening processes. Rob walked through five assumptions that no longer hold up.
1. "A trained eye can catch the fakes"
This used to be mostly true. Leasing agents learned to spot an off font, a fuzzy logo or withholding math that didn't add up. AI tools have erased those tells. They produce tidy layouts, accurate logos and internally consistent numbers, without the typos that gave away older template fakes. Gut instinct also doesn't scale, and it won't beat a polished document.
What works now is what you can't see on the page:
- Provenance: where the document came from
- File metadata: what created it, and when
- Behavior: how the applicant moved through the application
A pay stub generated minutes before submission, by software no payroll provider uses, tells you more than any visual inspection.
2. "Fraud is about fake income"
Pay stubs get the attention, but income is rarely the first red flag. Identity verification usually is: an ID photo that wasn't taken of a physical card, or a face image that doesn't meet the document's requirements.
From there, the signals tend to stack up:
- Credit: A fake identity often comes with a fake credit profile. Watch for a 700+ score built on a single tradeline, along with an address-mismatch warning on the report.
- Income: Pay stubs, bank statements and offer letters.
- Housing history: "Lived with family or friends" is normal on its own. Combined with other flags, it can hide an eviction record.
Rob described a pattern Boom sees often, which the team calls "the Perfect Newcomer":
- A flagged identity
- An offer letter or other income document
- Thin but strong credit (a 650+ score with fewer than three tradelines)
- One long housing history entry living with family, often five years or more
Any one of these can have an innocent explanation. Two or more on the same application is your cue to slow down and look closer.
3. "AI fraud hasn't hit us yet"
If your team hasn't caught any AI-generated fraud, it's more likely that it got through than that it isn't there.
It comes in two forms:
- AI-generated documents are built from scratch with a prompt or a fraud tool and never existed as real documents.
- AI-edited documents are real files with a few fields quietly changed, like the name, employer or deposit amounts. These are the more dangerous of the two since they pass a lot of surface-level checks.
Both are growing. Inscribe, a document-fraud detection company, reported that the monthly volume of AI-flagged documents across its network grew fourfold from June 2025 to May 2026. Template-based fakes are still two to three times more common, but that gap is closing. Quality is up too. AI bank statements from two years ago had obvious tells. Today's are hard to tell apart from the real thing, and the tools are free or cheap and need no technical skill.
4. "Fraud is an Atlanta thing"
Atlanta earned its reputation. It's cited for application fraud more than any other metro by a wide margin, and Georgia ranks second among states.
Maryland, home to Baltimore, takes the top spot. Here are the states with the highest share of applicants submitting a fraud-flagged document:
- Maryland: 18.8%
- Georgia: 15.4%
- Virginia: 15.0%
- Iowa: 14.2%
- Michigan: 14.1%
- Mississippi: 14.1%
- Texas: 13.8%
- Ohio: 13.7%
- Arkansas: 13.7%
The national average is 12.9%.
Fraud happens everywhere. Even outside the usual hot spots, your exposure is probably closer to the national average than you'd expect.
5. "Our current process covers us"
Plenty of operators rely on a trusted local screening company or a process they built themselves. That can hold up against yesterday's fraud. The gap is visibility.
Rob told the story of an applicant we'll call Harper. In August 2025, she applied with one property manager, then applied with a different manager in a nearby market a few weeks later. Each manager saw one application and had no reason to connect them. One person can now create documents in minutes and apply with several property managers within weeks. If your screening only sees your own applications, those repeat attempts don't show up.
His advice: when you evaluate screening providers, ask whether they can flag an applicant who has used fake documents somewhere else.
Five things you can do this week
Rob closed with steps that don't need any new software:
- Compare documents against each other. Does the employer on the pay stub match the offer letter, the bank deposits and the applicant's stated job? Fakes often hold up one at a time and fall apart side by side.
- Check file properties. In most PDF readers, File > Properties shows the producer, creator and creation date. A pay stub created in a web browser, or minutes before the application, deserves a second look.
- Keep a duplicate log. Track employer names, phone numbers, email domains and bank details across applicants. Reused details are a strong signal.
- Know the Perfect Newcomer. Two or more of the four signals means it's time to dig deeper.
- Update your lease language. Make false statements on the application a lease violation. The National Apartment Association's standard lease, for example, treats false answers on an application as a default, the same as not paying rent.
A policy model worth copying
Rob also pointed to Florida as an example. CS/HB 1293, the state's new law on fraudulent entry of residential dwellings, took effect 10/1/2026. It makes it a third-degree felony to knowingly lie about your identity or use forged financial documents on a rental application, and it lets landlords end the lease with a seven-day notice. It passed both chambers unanimously. Rob encouraged investors and their state trade groups to push for similar laws.
The bottom line
Fraudsters have better tools now. To stay ahead, your screening needs better tools too.
Rob's full article on this topic ran in REI Ink. Want to see how BoomScreen catches what the eye can't? Book a demo.
