Synthetic identities look like perfect applicants on paper. Good credit score, clean background check, consistent documentation. Traditional screening tools wave them through, because on the surface, nothing looks wrong. That's exactly the point. A synthetic identity isn't built to look suspicious. It's built to look ordinary, patiently, over months or years, specifically so it passes the checks a leasing team already trusts.
Identity theft and synthetic identity fraud get lumped together, but they behave very differently. Identity theft uses one real person's complete identity, stolen wholesale. Synthetic identity fraud is more surgical: it combines a genuine Social Security number, often one belonging to a child, an elderly person, or someone with little to no credit history, with a fabricated name, date of birth, and address. According to the North Carolina Real Estate Commission, once an application built this way is approved, the fraudster uses the address to establish credit and run up balances under an identity that was never real to begin with, leaving property managers pursuing a tenant who doesn't legally exist and can never actually be collected from.
The National Apartment Association describes just how deep this fabricated profile can run: information attached to a synthetic identity can include public record data, credit history, documentary evidence, and even social media profiles built specifically to survive a manual review. In markets with strong tenant protections, NAA notes the cost of unwinding a single case of synthetic fraud can reach as high as $15,000 once eviction restrictions and legal timelines are factored in.
This isn't a niche or slow-moving threat. ynthetic identity fraud was the fastest-growing type of digital fraud globally from 2022 to 2023, with U.S. lender exposure to synthetic identities across auto loans, bank credit cards, retail credit cards, and personal loans climbing 63% in three years, from $1.9 billion at the end of 2020 to $3.1 billion by the end of 2023.
More recent global data suggests the trend is accelerating rather than plateauing. In fact, s ynthetic identity fraud now accounts for more than one in ten reported frauds worldwide, an eight-fold year-over-year increase, making it the fastest-growing fraud type globally. Estimated losses from synthetic identity fraud, sourced from Deloitte research, could reach $23 billion by 2030.
For multifamily specifically, this pattern shows up in eviction data too. Nearly a quarter (23.8%) of eviction filings among surveyed operators trace back to fraudulent applications, a category that increasingly includes synthetic identities rather than simple document forgery alone.
The reason synthetic identity fraud is so hard to catch with conventional screening comes down to what those checks are actually designed to verify. A credit pull confirms a Social Security number is valid and has an associated credit history. A background check confirms whether a name has a criminal or eviction record. Neither is built to ask whether the name, date of birth, and Social Security number genuinely belong together as one real person. Because part of the underlying data is real, the credit file returns results, the SSN validates, and the fraud hides in a mismatch that a standard check was never designed to surface.
Fraudsters exploit this patiently. A synthetic identity typically spends months building a thin but plausible credit profile, opening a secured card, becoming an authorized user on someone else's account, making a handful of on-time payments, specifically so that by the time a rental application is submitted, the profile clears a basic credit pull without triggering a single obvious red flag.
The fix isn't a sharper eye during manual review. It's structural: Verifying that income and identity data are genuinely connected to a real, active person at the point of application, rather than trusting that a passing credit score and a clean document mean the underlying identity is real.
When you choose MeasureOne, you get an ecosystem built for proptech and property management teams:
Intelligent document processing extracts and validates structured data from applicant documents at the point of ingestion, surfacing inconsistencies a manual reviewer working quickly might miss.
Automated VOIE goes a step further, connecting directly to payroll and bank sources to confirm that income and employment data reflects a real, currently active relationship between a person and an employer, something a synthetic profile with fabricated employment history cannot produce on demand.
Renters insurance verification and monitoring extends that same source-verified standard across the life of the lease, so a policy tied to a fabricated identity doesn't simply sit unmonitored until a claim exposes it.
Together, these solutions push verification earlier in the funnel, at ingestion, rather than relying on a downstream credit or background check that was never designed to catch a blended identity in the first place. For property managers and proptech platforms looking to close this gap before a synthetic applicant ever reaches a lease signature, Get started to see how source-verified data can stop synthetic identities before they ever make it past application.