Vishing attacks — voice-based phishing conducted over phone calls, VoIP or voice messages — jumped 442 percent between the first and second halves of 2024, according to CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report.
By the first quarter of 2025, voice phishing had become the most common phishing type, accounting for more than 60 percent of all phishing-related incident response engagements, per Cisco Talos data.
Real estate professionals say the industry is a prime target. The timing, the money and the trust are all there.
“Wire fraud is no longer an email issue,” Chris Murphy — founder of Waterfront Homes, LLC, a Washington-based firm specializing in coastal and second-home transactions — told Inman. “It is a trust issue, and real estate is based on trust.”
A familiar voice, a fraudulent wire
The mechanics are straightforward. A fraudster harvests voice recordings of a loan officer, agent or title rep from publicly available material, such as YouTube videos, podcasts and recorded webinars.
Voice cloning software can generate a usable synthetic voice from just a few minutes of audio. Then the fraudster identifies a buyer or borrower mid-transaction and places a call at a high-stakes moment: the day before closing, during a rate lock conversation or when wire instructions are being finalized.
The caller sounds like someone the buyer has been working with for months. The message: The wire instructions have changed and need to be handled immediately.
That combination of urgency, authority and a familiar voice is what makes the attack hard to catch.
“A criminal only needs to choose the right moment to insert themselves in the process,” Murphy told Inman. “The buyer receives a voice call that sounds like someone involved in the original transaction, and after it, they receive an email or text with the new wiring details.”
Cody Schuiteboer, president and CEO of Best Interest Financial, said the threat crystallized for lenders when reports emerged of borrowers receiving calls impersonating their loan officers. He noted that fraudsters have learned to time their attempts to coincide with moments of maximum borrower anxiety.
“The key to remember here is the timing,” Schuiteboer said. “Fraudsters know that borrowers are anxious about closing, want to make it happen and are used to following their loan officer’s directions implicitly. The cloned voice makes that process extremely efficient since it comes at the right time and is virtually impossible to detect.”
Your personal brand is also a liability
Old-school wire fraud attempts arrived via email with recognizable tells: slightly misspelled domains, unnatural phrasing, and an air of urgency. Recipients had learned to spot them. AI voice cloning removes those signals entirely.
“Voice cloning removes the final ‘good gut-check’ instinct that buyers rely on, and that is why this type of scam is untouchable at this time via the tools available,” said Michael Benoit, founder of ContractorBond.org and president of Pacific United Insurance Services.
The professionals most at risk may be the most successful ones. Agents and loan officers who’ve built strong personal brands through video content, podcast appearances and webinars have generated the largest libraries of publicly available audio and, therefore, the most material for cloning.
“The top agents who created the strongest personal brands are the ones who are in the most danger of impersonation because their customers are familiar with this voice and take it on faith,” Benoit said.
Cheryl Benjamin, a real estate broker and founder of Loving Phoenix Realty in Glendale, Arizona, said the scam exploits a feature of the closing process, not a flaw in buyers. The process is supposed to move fast, with constant updates from multiple parties.
“You’re dealing with paperwork, deadlines and large amounts of money. When you’re in the middle of all that, you tend to trust people who sound like they know what’s going on,” Benjamin said. “That’s exactly where scammers get you.”
Complexity is the vulnerability
Blake O’Shaughnessy, co-founder of Ownli, said that the one thing that doesn’t get talked about enough is that real estate fraud thrives in complexity.
“The more parties involved, the more emails flying around, the more consumers are expected to trust without really knowing who’s doing what, the easier it is for bad actors to find a way in,” O’Shaughnessy told Inman.
He noted that most buyers aren’t making mistakes out of carelessness. They’re making them because they’re overwhelmed.
“Buying a home is already a lot, and by the time the wire instructions show up, people are just trying to get to the finish line,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Questioning every detail isn’t really where their head is at.”
The industry’s answer, he said, has basically been to tell people to stay alert and verify everything. That made sense 10 years ago, but it’s a lot harder to sell now when AI can clone a voice, replicate an email thread perfectly, and do it at scale.
“The weak point was never that buyers weren’t careful enough,” O’Shaughnessy said. “It’s that we built a process with so many seams in it that something was always going to slip through. At some point, you have to ask whether simplifying the whole thing would do more than any training program ever could.”
Low-tech fixes for a high-tech threat
Simplifying the closing process, as O’Shaughnessy suggests, would help. But for now, real estate professionals say many of the existing defenses are low-tech and require setup before anyone is ever on a deadline.
Best Interest Financial now confirms wire instructions through a second, independent channel — reaching out directly to the borrower’s verified number on file, not waiting for a callback or reply text.
The firm also limits what gets shared over calls to information covered in a pre-established communication plan.
“To be perfectly frank, however, most lenders’ responses and measures haven’t been quick enough to respond to this challenge,” Schuiteboer said. “The reality now is that whatever public audio you created is available to someone working on a clone, which isn’t a paranoid idea because it’s true.”
Schuiteboer said “the only surefire defense in the long run” is a culture that treats voice alone as an insufficient means of confirming identity for any transfer of funds.
Benoit and Murphy both recommended a code-word protocol established before closing begins. The buyer, agent and closing team agree on a verification phrase at the start of the relationship. No phrase, no wire movement.
“Agents who already do a dual verification process, both over the phone and with a known email, aren’t losing clients to this scam,” Benoit said.
Benjamin said agents can do a lot to protect their clients, and it should start at the beginning of the process.
“Clients need to know that they should always check twice before sending any money,” she said. “It is a good idea to send them something short that covers who handles the wire instructions and what to do if they get a weird call. Most clients are afraid to ask questions, so just bring it up yourself at the start.”
Benjamin said red flags include someone trying to rush you, asking to change bank details, calling from a number you’ve never seen before or saying that if you don’t do it now, it will be too late.
“And even if the voice sounds like someone you know, that does not mean it is really them, because today, anyone can copy a voice,” she said. “Never send money based on one phone call or one email. Do not rush, check twice and never change payment instructions until you confirm it directly with someone you know.”
