In this article
Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →The National Association of Realtors told its members on 5 October 2026 that a voice on the telephone can no longer be taken as proof of who is speaking. The warning appeared in an article on the association's REALTOR News pages, written by contributing editor Melissa Dittmann Tracey and built on a webinar, "Cybersecurity in the Age of AI", run by NAR's Tech & Innovation team.
It arrives alongside a new online resource from the association, "Protecting Your Clients and Your Business From Fraud", which is organised around three steps: prevent, detect and report. The trade publication Real Estate News reported the launch of that resource on 1 October 2026. Read together, the two pieces show how the association now describes the risk at closing: the fraud is old, and the tools used to carry it out have changed.
The association's own staff supplied the sharpest line. "Voice alone is no longer reliable proof of identity," said Sebastian Drywa, NAR's director of cybersecurity, as quoted by REALTOR News.
Sources: NAR REALTOR News, 5 October 2026; FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center and American Land Title Association figures as reported by HousingWire, 5 October 2026.
What NAR published
The REALTOR News article is a report of what NAR's specialists told members during the webinar. Two of the speakers hold posts inside the association. Mr Drywa leads cybersecurity. Mike Woodward is NAR's director of data science.
According to the article, Mr Drywa told the audience that artificial intelligence has turned three familiar schemes into more dangerous ones: phishing, business email compromise and impersonation. The word he used, REALTOR News reports, was that AI has "weaponized" them. None of the three is new to the trade. What the association describes is a change in how convincing they have become.
Related readRental scams in Australia: official warnings, figures and checksThe fraud-prevention resource is a separate piece of work. Real Estate News, in its 1 October report, quoted Austin Perez, a senior policy representative at NAR. He said, in substance, that real estate transactions attract fraud because of the large sums of money involved.
Citing FBI data, NAR says real estate fraud cost consumers more than US$275 million in 2025. The resource groups its material under the three headings of prevent, detect and report. The research behind this article did not open the resource's individual pages, so what follows relies on the dated REALTOR News article and on the press reports named in each section.
Three seconds of audio
The detail that gives the warning its weight came from Mr Woodward. He told the webinar, according to REALTOR News, that about three seconds of publicly available audio or video can be enough to produce a convincing deepfake.
The NAR article makes the point about publicly available recordings in general; it does not list which kinds of recording have been used in real cases.
This is why Mr Drywa's sentence matters at closing. NAR's cybersecurity director is saying that recognising a voice no longer settles the matter. What the association recommends is covered below, and it keeps the telephone in the process: the check is a call to a number already on file.
Mr Woodward raised a second risk that runs in the other direction. REALTOR News reports that he warned of data leakage when staff type sensitive information into large language models, and urged brokerages to set policies on it. The concern here is not a criminal's use of AI but a firm's own: client details entered into a tool may leave the firm's control.
Related readStalled or cancelled off-plan project in Dubai: what protects buyersThe red flags the article lists
The REALTOR News piece sets out the signs its speakers asked members to watch for. There are four.
- A sudden change to wire instructions.
- A request that does not fit the normal pattern of the transaction.
- Unexpected urgency around money.
- A message or a caller that is unusually convincing.
The fourth stands out, because it reverses an instinct. In the association's account, a message that reads perfectly, or a caller who sounds exactly right, is now itself listed among the things to notice.
None of the four is presented as proof of fraud. The article presents them as prompts to stop and check, which is how the safeguards that follow are framed.
What the sources recommend
The safeguards in the NAR article are procedural. They do not depend on buying anything. They are reported here as what NAR's speakers recommended to members, not as instructions that are certain to fit any one reader's transaction; how a closing is run depends on the state, the lender and the title or closing company involved.
REALTOR News lists four practices.
- Set a code word early. The article describes agreeing a word at the start of the relationship, at contract signing, and sharing it only with the clients and the title or closing company. A caller who cannot give it has not been verified, however familiar the voice.
- Tell clients in advance that wire instructions never change by email without separate verification. The point of saying it early is that a later message announcing a change then contradicts something the client has already been told.
- Verify through a telephone number already on file. The check is a call placed by the person who received the request, to a number held from before the request arrived, and not to a number supplied in the message itself.
- Slow down when urgency appears. The speakers treated pressure to move money quickly as a reason to verify, not as a reason to act.
A change to wire instructions is checked by a call the recipient makes
NAR's speakers recommend telling clients that wire instructions never change by email without separate verification, and verifying through a telephone number already on file. The article names the title or closing company as a party to the code word, alongside the clients.
The four practices share one idea. Each moves the proof of identity away from something a fraudster can copy, such as an email address, a writing style or a voice, and towards something agreed beforehand that an outsider would not know.
The webinar also touched on physical security. REALTOR News reports that one speaker, the chief executive of a biometric building-access company taking part in NAR's 2026 REACH accelerator programme, argued that picture badges, lockbox codes and sign-in sheets give the look of security without proving who a person is. That speaker sells an alternative, and the NAR article does not present any product as the association's answer.
Related readDubai property fraud: official checks, Ejari and where to complainThe numbers behind the warning
NAR's figure of more than US$275 million comes from the FBI. HousingWire, the trade publication, reported the detail on 5 October 2026 from the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3: 12,368 real estate fraud complaints in 2025, with reported losses of US$275.1 million. The comparable loss figure for 2024 was US$173.6 million.
Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center figures as reported by HousingWire, 5 October 2026. Losses reported in complaints, by calendar year.
The difference between the two years is US$101.5 million, a rise of about 58 per cent. Two cautions apply. These are losses reported in complaints to one federal body, so they measure what people told the FBI, not every loss that occurred. And the IC3 category covers real estate fraud as a whole; the figures reported by HousingWire do not say what share involved AI-generated voices or images. Neither NAR nor the press reports used here put a number on that.
HousingWire's report also carried a figure from the American Land Title Association: 59 per cent of title companies saw at least one seller-impersonation attempt in 2025. Seller impersonation is the scheme in which someone poses as the owner of a property in order to sell it. It is a different fraud from the diverted wire transfer, but it rests on the same weakness the NAR webinar describes: an identity that is accepted without being proved.
The email side of the problem
The NAR speakers named business email compromise among the schemes AI has sharpened, and a case study published in the same week shows what the email side of the problem can look like for one brokerage team.
Inman, the trade publication, reported on 7 October 2026 on work by the firm SH Consulting for a REMAX team in Nashville. Of 364 internet domains the team owned, 79 were sending email the team had never written. After the team enforced DMARC, an email authentication standard, reports of unauthorised mail fell from 235 in the five weeks before the change to 43 in the five weeks after, and all 43 were rejected, according to Inman's account of the case study.
Related readTitle fraud in New South Wales: how the Torrens Assurance Fund worksThis is one team's experience, reported by a consultancy about its own client, and it is not a measure of the industry. It does illustrate the point behind NAR's second and third recommendations. A message can appear to come from an agent's own domain without the agent having sent it, which is why the association's speakers place the check outside the email altogether.
Where this leaves a closing
The closing itself already has fixed points that the safeguards attach to. One of them is described by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: a lender must provide the Closing Disclosure at least three business days before closing. In the NAR article's timeline, the code word is agreed earlier still, at contract signing, so that it exists before any request about money arrives.
What the association has published is guidance for its members and not a rule. Nothing in the REALTOR News article or in the Real Estate News report describes a new obligation on agents, a change to NAR's code or a deadline. The resource is offered as a reference, and the webinar's recommendations are practices that a brokerage may choose to adopt.
A voice that sounds right and a message that reads well were once reassuring. In NAR's account, both now belong on the list of things to check.
For buyers and sellers, the practical consequence described by the sources is modest and specific. An agent who follows the NAR recommendations may raise the subject of wire fraud at the first meeting, may propose a code word, and may say plainly that any change to payment details will be confirmed by a call to a number already held. For title and closing companies, the same recommendations mean being part of that arrangement from the start, since the article names them as one of the only parties who should hold the code word.
The association's message to its members is narrower than the headline numbers: recognition is not verification, and the check that counts is the one agreed before anyone asks for money.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
