How to Verify Wire Instructions When the Phone Number Itself Can Be Faked

A Real Estate AI Society roundup opens on the number. "The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center clocked real estate wire fraud at $275 million in 2025, up from $173 million the year before."

What changed is the method. "The new wrinkle is deepfakes: a scammer clones a voice from a few seconds of audio, pulled off a voicemail or a listing video, then impersonates the title officer or closing attorney to reroute the buyer's wire."

And this is why the old advice fails. "Studies show people catch high-quality synthetic audio only about a quarter of the time," which is why NAR has published a consumer guide on spotting it.

The author is honest that there is no clean answer yet and gives the baseline instead: "don't trust the voice on the call." "Confirm wire instructions through a number and a person you set up ahead of time, and tell your clients to do the exact same."

His framing of why this lands on an agent's desk at all: "We spend most of our energy talking about AI as a growth tool, and we need to recognize it can be genuinely dangerous to our clients too."

The advice you have been giving now has a hole in the middle of it. The number your client calls is often the one printed in the email they are trying to verify, and the voice that answers can be assembled from the seconds of a title officer or of you talking on your own listing video. The fix is not more caution at the moment of the wire. It is fixing the number and the person at the start of the transaction, when nobody is under pressure and nothing is urgent.

Do it at the point your clients are most receptive: the day you go under contract, in writing, with the phone number they will use and the name of the person who will answer it. Then tell them that no email, no text, and no voice will ever change those instructions. The bar for the scam is one plausible call at the exact moment a buyer is expecting to hear from the closing office.

1. At contract, send every client the closing office phone number and contact name in writing, and tell them it is the only number they will ever use.
2. Tell clients plainly that no email, text, or call will ever change wire instructions, and that a familiar voice is not verification.
3. Assume any audio you publish can be cloned, and never let a voice on an inbound call be the thing that authorizes a wire.