COVID eviction protections created a backlog of unpaid rent, spawning a black market for forged documents. Bad actors now sell fake pay stubs and driver's licenses for $25 on TikTok and Facebook, helping applicants deceive landlords. Rental fraud has become a top priority for major housing companies.
fraud had suddenly become this really big priority for like senior leadership in multifamily. And I'd never heard that before. So it's like, okay, what's going on? Well, basically what happened was after COVID, you had, you know, the eviction moratoria, you had this kind of backlog of bad debts that took a while to work its way out of the system. But what you also had was because there were now these rules that could be gamed, you found that it created this black market for advice on how to get around eviction rules, how to maximize your free stay in a property. And as the eviction moratoria started to go away, these people kind of started to focus on telling people how to cheat the application processes, the checks that people do to screen you when you're applying for an apartment. And so what you found was you had this combination of lots of bad actors, you know, putting bad advice out on TikTok and Facebook groups and so on. You had lots of really high-quality fake documents that were being made to order. Of course, you have people educating people on where to go find the good documents and, you know, for $25, I can fool pretty much anybody with my pay stub, my offer letter, my driver's, like, whatever it is that, and this sort of emerged as this really big problem that everyone felt the need to solve.
