There may be a lot of fraud (especially here in South Florida) but for a homeowner who has this vacant property that they don’t know what to do with, I would still think overall that completing a short sale (with acceptable terms from the bank) and having their credit reflect a settlement on their mortgage would be the more safe route.

I would say you are correct, anyone can fake it, but the chances of someone risking committing fraud while having the above verified via 3rd Parties strikes me as being somewhat low.In fact, it would be someone who would be willing to commit other crimes then just giving false information to a Landlord.If the person got away with it like Bernie Madoff (haha... his last name is really a Pun), it's very difficult to blame the victim in this case because 99% of people will wind up renting to this person.I don't think you will find that there was a Landlord that had issues with a tenant after getting all that verifiable evidence.If there was a few tenants, it is so rare that it would be deemed insignificant risk.

Mortgage fraud is something that can get you into a lot of trouble.

Too many variables and chance for fraud.

The most reliable comps are where they all are identical in bed/bath/garage and within that 20% of size.

I spoke with a the city assessor in Tosa a while ago they said they are looking to have the properties on a street be correctly positioned to each other, meaning that they want to identical houses being assessed the same.

The assigned appraiser's software didn't support pennies, so the appraisal had the wrong sales price on it, which in turn meant the purchase price on the appraisal couldn't be made to line up with our software, which in turn (& absurdly) raised an automated fraud flag that had to be manually escalated as an "exception" bla bla bla. 

Check for fraud in payments and distributions to non existent contractors.

Account ClosedIf it is deemed fraud he could go to jail as well as pay fines.  

I bought my home at $100K below the mortgage owed, and it was an REO for 3 years.To understand why banks are so cautious, I learn from my wife it's an anti fraud thing.