The caller said he was in Chicago. He owned land in the Phoenix area and wanted to sell it fast.
“I bought this property a long time ago … but then I had to relocate,” he says in a recording of the call. “Now I need to sell to raise money for a deposit on another property I’m interested in, in Colorado. I’d like to close this as soon as possible.”
Listen to the recording below:
The man on the other end of the line, Arizona real estate agent John Rowan, didn’t hang up.
Instead, he kept asking questions and eventually got the caller to send over a driver’s license and wiring instructions. Then Rowan tracked down the property’s real owner, who was in Chicago and had no plans to sell.
The ID, the owner told Rowan, had his real address, his real license number, his real expiration date and even his signature, written the way he always writes it, with no space between his first initial and last name. The only things that didn’t match were the photo, height, weight and eye color.
“He could walk into a bank with that ID and basically wipe out my account,” Rowan recalled the owner telling him.
Rowan passed the wiring information to the Arizona Attorney General’s office and to Citibank, which he said identified it as a money mule account.
That call is one of two Rowan recorded and shared with Inman. Together, they offer a window into a problem that real estate agents, title companies and regulators say is worsening as artificial intelligence lowers the barrier for scammers.
‘Every agent is really the first responder’
Rowan’s second recording captured an attempted deed fraud. His assistant fielded the call from a man claiming to represent an owner who’d inherited a vacant house she couldn’t afford and wanted to unload as soon as possible.
Listen to the recording below:
That call led to a sting with the Scottsdale police and the arrest and conviction of two people, according to Rowan, one of whom received a 30-month prison sentence.
Before police got involved, Rowan said he tracked down the real owner, who told him he’d gotten a notice from the county but couldn’t get anyone to take his complaint seriously. Rowan paid out of pocket to send a notary to the owner’s house with an affidavit of forgery and had it recorded, clouding the title so the fraudsters couldn’t try again.
The case got Rowan an audience with Arizona’s real estate commissioner and the attorney general’s office. It also crystallized the argument he’s been making ever since.
“Every agent is really the first responder, the front line, the first person to get the phone call, the email,” Rowan told Inman. “But they don’t know what to do.”
In both calls, Rowan said agents should notice obvious red flags.
In the first recorded call, the caller said he was from out of state, lacked confidence in the details, was moving to a third state and had an urgent time frame to sell.
In the second recorded call, multiple parties were involved, there was confusion about names, and the timeframe was urgent.
In the attempted deed theft, the scammers initially said the property was inherited, then said it was gifted to them. The final red flag was that the property was vacant.
Rowan said he now uses both calls, with the addresses removed, to open a deed fraud class he teaches to Arizona real estate licensees. He added that Arizona is a one-party recording consent state, so the recordings are legal.
6 weeks that changed his career
Those two calls followed two incidents over six weeks in October 2025 that Rowan said pushed him into full-time real estate fraud prevention and founding his company, Home Fraud Defense.
In one, a buyer offered $1.475 million cash for Rowan’s own home, furniture included, then asked him to pay a $2,800 “fee” to unlock funds supposedly frozen in a money laundering investigation. Rowan had already turned down a legitimate offer.
In another, an 85-year-old retired doctor called him to list her home so she could send the proceeds to a man she believed was a soap opera star who needed money for throat surgery. Rowan tracked down her daughter, who stopped the sale.
Rowan admits he handled that one badly. He confronted the seller directly, and she kicked him out of the house and left him a one-star review. His company’s guidance now tells agents to find a family member before raising the issue.
From deepfakes to fake refunds
Asked what’s driving the rise in real estate fraud, Rowan pointed to two changes AI has brought.
First, it lets people with no industry knowledge, or even a grasp of the English language, run convincing schemes. Second, it makes experienced fraudsters far harder to spot.
John Rowan
He described emails that weave in local details to build trust before dropping wiring instructions: a mention of last night’s Arizona Cardinals football game or a note about a storm passing through.
“That’s like one second on ChatGPT and Claude,” Rowan said. “That person might not even understand English, let alone what the Cardinals are or what the weather was in the area. But that’s the level of sophistication that wasn’t around even a year ago.”
He also cited a recent Michigan case in which scammers emailed a couple from a lookalike address, then called from a near-identical number using what appears to have been a cloned version of their loan officer’s voice. The couple wired $66,000.
Rowan cited FBI data showing real estate fraud losses rose nearly 60 percent in 2025, to $275 million, amid roughly $21 billion in total reported cybercrime losses.
And the risk doesn’t end at closing. Rowan’s company tracks 21 types of scams that target buyers and sellers in the months after a deal, including a “refund” call in which a fake title rep claims the client was overcharged and asks for account details to wire the difference.
A safety briefing for home sales
Last year, Rowan founded Home Fraud Defense, a school certified in Arizona that offers free victim resources through the Arizona Department of Real Estate’s website.
Its tools for agents and MLSs include an address risk checker, an AI tool that rates suspicious emails and texts, a three-hour certification course, and a reporting system designed to collect the data law enforcement and insurers need.
The core idea borrows from Rowan’s earlier career as a United Airlines pilot. A flight attendant’s safety briefing doesn’t hit home in a casual coffee-shop conversation, he said. It hits once the cabin door closes.
So Home Fraud Defense sends client-facing fraud notices timed to the transaction: one at listing or buyer intake, another when the deal goes pending and wire fraud risk peaks, and a third after closing. The notices are agent-branded and tracked, which Rowan said also gives agents a paper trail if a client later claims they were never warned.
On the MLS side, the address tool can flag properties that multiple agents have tried to enter, a pattern that showed up with the Phoenix-area land parcel in Rowan’s first recording.
Lessons from the cockpit
The work has drawn the National Association of Realtors’ attention.
Rowan said the NAR contacted him after finding his company through ChatGPT and asked him to join its Federal Technology Policy Committee to help set federal policy. He’s also scheduled to speak at an international event in Turkey alongside CMLS CEO Jessica Edgerton.
He’s hosting what he calls the first annual real estate fraud awareness event on Oct. 30 in Arizona, with speakers from the state’s real estate department, the attorney general’s office and the U.S. Secret Service.
Rowan’s warning to the industry draws on his time at United Airlines. Months before 9/11, he said, pilots were trained to comply fully with hijackers, and calls for hardened cockpit doors were dismissed as too costly.
After the attacks, everything changed overnight.
“Suddenly pilots were carrying guns, there were Kevlar doors, and you can’t even bring nail clippers through security,” Rowan said. “Everything the pilots’ union had been saying all along.”
He sees real estate heading toward a similar reckoning if it doesn’t act first.
“If we don’t acknowledge fraud as an industry and make it part of the conversation now, the real estate transaction itself could fall into a category where people say, ‘You’re selling a house? Don’t answer an email, don’t click a message,'” Rowan said. “Let’s have this conversation now, before we’re reacting to people losing their houses and identities while following their professionals’ guidance.”
