The Realty of Deception: Real Estate Frauds Uncovered in the Middle East

Group-IB outlines a growing wave of real estate rental scams that exploit trust in legitimate listing and registration platforms, using social engineering, mule accounts, and sometimes compromised platform accounts to facilitate authorized push payment fraud. The report explains how mule networks are uncovered via device, behavioral, relationship, geo (geohash), and network analysis, supported by graph analytics to blocklist linked devices and accounts. It highlights financial and reputational risks for users and organizations, and provides targeted recommendations, including user education, collaborative intelligence sharing, advanced account/device monitoring, traffic/source tracking, and controls to mitigate social engineering during high-risk transactions.