The Scale of the Problem, in Government Numbers
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, IC3, recorded 12,368 real estate fraud complaints in 2025, totaling $275.1 million in reported losses. Real estate transactions, proof-of-funds and wire-fraud schemes included, are also a major share of the separate $3.04 billion in 2025 business-email-compromise losses IC3 tracked across 24,768 complaints. A wholesaler signing an assignment based on a fabricated proof-of-funds letter is not a rare, unlucky edge case; it sits inside a fraud category the FBI is actively tracking at a national scale.
The Concrete Red Flags in a Forged Letter
CheckFile.ai, an AI document-verification vendor whose product specifically screens financial documents, lists the operational red flags that show up in a forged proof-of-funds letter: an unfamiliar or obscure bank name, a contact email on a free consumer domain, gmail or similar, rather than the bank’s own corporate domain, a suspiciously round balance figure that barely clears the offer price, inconsistent fonts or logo resolution that suggests the PDF has been edited, a missing or masked account number, and a letter dated just days before an unusually large wire.
None of these individually proves fraud, a legitimate buyer can have an odd-looking letter for an innocent reason, but a letter carrying two or three of these signals at once is worth a second look before an assignment gets signed around it.
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Book a Real Estate Fit CallThe One Verification Step That Actually Catches Forgeries
The core verification step is calling the bank back using a phone number sourced independently, from the bank’s own public website or a general directory, never the number printed on the letter itself. A forged letter’s printed contact information is written by the person who forged it, so calling that number simply confirms whatever story the forger already built in. Calling an independently sourced number reaches the actual institution, which either confirms the account and balance or reveals the letter never came from them at all.
Why This Matters Most at the Assignment Stage, Not the Dispo Stage
A wholesaler vetting buyers for an ongoing relationship has time to build trust over multiple deals. The riskiest moment is the first assignment with a new buyer under time pressure, when a fast-moving deal creates exactly the conditions a forger wants: a wholesaler eager to lock in a buyer and a closing timeline too tight to slow down and make a verification call. That is precisely when the red flags above matter most, and precisely when they are easiest to skip.
Building Verification Into the Process, Not Just the Instinct
Relying on a gut feeling about whether a buyer seems legitimate is not a verification process, it is a coin flip that happens to work most of the time. A repeatable check, does the letter name a real, recognizable bank, does the contact domain match the bank, does the balance look plausible rather than suspiciously exact, and was the bank called back at an independently sourced number, catches the fraud pattern CheckFile.ai and the IC3 numbers both point to, before a signature makes it too late to matter.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, "2025 IC3 Annual Report"
- CheckFile.ai, "Fake Proof of Funds Letters in US Real Estate: How to Spot Them"