Appraisal Fraud and Illegal Property Flipping: Detecting Inflated Values Before the Loan Funds
Collateral fraud is the most expensive kind a lender can fund, because the loss lands on a property that was never worth the loan. How value inflation, cherry-picked comparables, condition misrepresentation, edited photos and flip chains show up in a mortgage file, what FHA's anti-flipping rule at 24 CFR 203.37a and appraiser independence under Regulation Z require, and the collateral checks an AI agent can run on every appraisal rather than a sample.