A Denver real estate agent avoided becoming the victim of a sophisticated identity theft scheme which tried to capture her image and a video during a concocted Zoom call.
The attempt is part of a growing use of artificial intelligence targeting real estate agents and brokerages across the country.
The deepfakes are being used in fake Facetime and Zoom calls to lure homebuyers out of their money by convincing them to send wire transfers to fraudsters instead of the seller.
She Received An Unsolicited Email From A Home Seller
The agent shared her experience on Reddit about how she received what appeared to be a legitimate email from a woman claiming she needed help selling her aging parents’ home in the Denver area.
The supposed client said she lived out of state and had gotten the her name from another professional at the same brokerage.
“She asked when I was available to jump on a Zoom call, which seemed harmless,” the agent wrote in her Reddit posts. This type of request is pretty common for real estate agents who often conduct their initial consultations via zoom calls and remotely.
The home seller sent her a zoom link to join the call at 7pm that night.
It Quickly Got Weird When The Link Was Sent
When the real estate agent clicked the meeting link at the scheduled 7 PM time slot, a red flag appeared almost immediately. Instead of entering a normal Zoom call, she encountered a very unusual verification request.
This is the request she received.
The system first demanded to scan her face, instructing that the camera needed to see her from the waist up “to detect for movement.”
Then came an even stranger request that made the agent end the call immediately. The instructions wanted her to do a 360 scan of her from the waist up, telling her to pause for 10 seconds in each direction.
“Since when does Zoom ask to see your entire body?” she wrote on the post. “Front, back and both sides and scan your body?”
She Was Being Targeted To Create A Deepfake Doppelganger
Alarmed by the suspicious turn of events, the agent posted her concerns on Reddit and then investigated if Zoom legitimately performs this sort of full body identity verification scan.
Within a day, she had her answer.
“Turns out my ‘paranoia’ was spot on,” she concluded in an update to her original post. “Scammer was most likely trying to make a deepfake Realtor version of me.”
Experts were quick to point out that she was likely targeted by a scammer that wanted to capture her imagery to create a deepfake Avatar twin which can be created on websites like HeyGen.
By capturing her video from multiple angles, the scammers could use this to create a very realistic deepfake of the agent and then use that to scam potential clients.
These deepfakes are often indstinguishable from real videos of a person and are increasingly being used in wire transfers scams, romance scams and CEO deepfakes.
Security experts say these schemes target real estate agents specifically because their faces and voices are valuable for fraud. A convincing deepfake of a trusted local agent could be used to scam home buyers, sellers, or even facilitate wire fraud in property transactions.
The Scammer Was Persistent Even After She Was Discovered
Even after the Denver agent confronted the scammer about the suspicious verification process, they persisted. The next morning, she received another email from the supposed client claiming she had been at work “all night” with patients and asking to reschedule.
“I guess persistence must pay off in this line of work,” the agent noted.
Another and final red flag? The scammer ignored her previous offers to use legitimate platforms like Google Meet or FaceTime, insisting only on their fraudulent link.
“I would caution everyone to be extremely circumspective when communicating with people they don’t know online, especially when it comes to new leads of any kind,” the agent warned in her final update.
Real Estate agents, be warned this is a trend that is growing every single day.
