Tenant screening has quietly become a fraud problem. Snappt and Burnt both report that roughly 1 in 8 rental applications — about 12.5% — now contain fraudulent income documentation. The accelerant is generative AI: document fraud jumped roughly 500% in 2025 as free tools began producing convincing fake pay stubs in under a minute.
A sharper signal than the pay stub itself
TransUnion's 2026 research adds a screening signal that's harder to fake than a document: applicants with 15 or more credit inquiries in the seven days before applying charged off at 32% within a year, versus about 9% for the overall pool. Velocity of credit-seeking, not just the paperwork, flags the riskiest files.