A year ago, you could spot a fake bank statement by squinting at it. The numbers sat in a slightly different font. The PDF went blurry in the wrong places.
Tom DeRose, CEO of PandaGuarantee, says those tells are gone. "Now it's unbelievable how good it can one-shot perfect looking bank statements, a perfect looking ID," he said in a recent interview. Some fake IDs even carry numbers that check out against a government database. Only the photo is fake.
For a landlord, that changes what a document is worth. AI can produce a pay stub, a bank statement or an offer letter on request. If your screen depends on the papers an applicant hands you, it depends on something you can no longer trust.
How common is rental application fraud?
Common enough that most large operators deal with it every year. In a National Multifamily Housing Council survey of 75 major apartment operators, 93.3% had seen fraud in the prior 12 months, and 84.3% of those had received fabricated pay stubs or income documents.
That survey ran before the current wave of AI tools. By August 2026, 67% of landlords and property managers told screening company Checkr that AI-generated fraud had become harder to catch than a year earlier.
Most applicants are still honest. Screening firm Snappt found fraud in about 1 in 26 applications it reviewed in the first half of 2026. The hard part is telling the 25 from the 1 when every file looks clean.
The applicants you can't fully check
Fraud is hardest to rule out on files that lean on documents. Think of an international graduate student with no U.S. credit history, a freelancer whose income arrives in lumps, or a professional relocating for a job that hasn't started yet. Most of these people are exactly who they say they are. But their applications rest on paperwork you can't independently confirm.
That leaves you two choices, and both cost money. Turn the applicant away and the unit sits empty another month. Approve on faith and you carry the loss if the paperwork was invented.
A guarantee gives you a third option. Send the applicant to PandaGuarantee, and we verify them before anything is issued.
How PandaGuarantee verifies an applicant
Most owners run a credit check and meet the applicant at a showing. Tom calls the second part a vibe check. It works when the person who tours is the person who signs, and fails when they aren't.
PandaGuarantee approves applicants remotely, so it can't lean on a vibe check. It verifies at the source instead.
Identity. The applicant scans their ID and their face. The ID is checked against a government database, and the face is matched to the ID. A forged license with real numbers fails, because the person holding the phone isn't the person on the record.
Income. The applicant connects their bank account through Plaid, so income is confirmed from the account itself, not from a PDF. Tom put it plainly:
"You can't fake a bank account that's real that has ten grand a month coming into it unless you have a bank account with your name on it with ten grand a month coming in."
The full picture. Credit, savings and income feed an objective underwriting formula. International applicants are assessed with PandaGuarantee's own classification system, built for people with no U.S. credit file. If something doesn't add up, or an applicant won't connect their bank, a person reviews the file line by line. Tom said that review has "caught quite a lot of fraudsters."
Some of the process stays private on purpose. Every detail published is one more thing a fraudster could study.
Why fraudsters skip the guarantee
Requiring a guarantee filters out fraud before PandaGuarantee even opens the file.
Fraud only pays when it's cheap. A fake pay stub costs nothing. A guarantee costs the applicant a premium up front, plus an identity check and a live bank connection. Someone who plans to stop paying rent rarely volunteers to pay a fee and hand over their banking data first. In PandaGuarantee's experience, they go somewhere else.
Tom made the same point about deterrence:
"You just have to be difficult enough where a fraudster sees I can go to someone else."
Fraudsters look for the easiest door on the block. A landlord who accepts emailed PDFs is that door. A landlord who says "you'll need a PandaGuarantee" is not.
What you get
The applicant pays for the guarantee. You pay nothing. You get an applicant who has passed identity, bank and underwriting checks you didn't have to run, and a surety bond behind the lease. If the tenant later stops paying, coverage can include the unpaid rent, and claims are paid in 3 business days.
That changes the math on borderline files. The student with no U.S. credit and the freelancer with lumpy income stop being judgment calls. You can approve qualified people your standard screen can't read.
Tom covers all of this in his interview on Closed!, a weekly New York real estate podcast. The fraud discussion starts at 17:15.
Next time an application looks a little too clean, send it to PandaGuarantee. Register your building at pandaguarantee.com.