Homeppl saves its clients over £1.2m in rental fraud in the final month of 2022.
Happy New Year to all! Whilst for many, December tis' the season to spread holiday cheer, we were also busy ensuring that our clients in the real estate sector were fully protected against the current rise in tenancy fraud.
We continue to see that the most prolific way fraudsters attempt to hoodwink our clients is by editing original bank statements to appear like they receive higher remuneration than they actually do. In fact this month, 67% of all the fraud cases we flagged included amateur edits on bank statements. Of course, our advanced document analysis tool picked these edits up with ease.
20% of fraudsters submitted fake passports and 13% had set up fake company websites within the same week of submitting their applications!
Homeppl's full consumer risk checks combines a range of financial, residential, behavioural, device and social media fraud assessments... if any application contains fake or misleading information, we'll identify it.
UK fraudster profile for December
In our continual quest to spread as much knowledge and information regarding the rise of application fraud in the rental sector to letting agencies, landlords and build-to-rent developers as possible, here is a data breakdown of our December fraud cases.
December fraudster profile:
We saw some real changes in the fraudster profile between November and December.
In a nutshell:
Gender & age
In November, 71% of the fraudsters that we identified were male. The average age of all fraudulent cases was 30 years old.
Last month, the average age shot up to 33 and there was a far more equitable ratio of male and female fraudsters: 53:47.
Income
Month on month we saw the average claimed income from fraudsters rise. This is to be expected as these claims align with the intention to secure luxurious rental properties for subletting etc. This is the first month we've seen that number drop from £112,000 to almost £74,000.
Location
In October and November, East London took the lion's share of fraud cases. However in December, West London seems to be the area most afflicted.
Surrey, Dorset and Manchester join London as UK fraud hotspots.
Fraud Spotlight
Through our fraud spotlight we aim to highlight a specific case and the technology used to protect our clients.
In the image above we see a Lloyds bank statement of a tenant who has gone to great lengths to pretend there is considerably more money in their bank than there actually is.
We can see quite clearly that our font analysis technology has detected modified inputs in the balance sections, adding an '8' before the actual figures.
Due to some bad maths, the total balance at the end of the statement did not add up as portrayed! Our automated document checker had no problem picking up the numerical discrepancy in a matter of seconds.
By flagging this statement, we saved our client approximately £68,288 in rental value and legal/eviction costs.
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Make sure you don't miss the January monthly fraud round up!
