Property Shield CEO Joins NAR Panel on Deepfakes and the Growing AI Fraud Threat

Alexander Fahsel, CEO of Property Shield, joined a panel webinar hosted through the National Association of REALTORS' tech.realtor platform, Deepfakes and the Growing AI Fraud Threat, recorded July 29, 2026. Fahsel appeared alongside Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Proof, and Tracey Hawkins, a 26-year real estate safety educator, to unpack how deepfakes are changing the shape of fraud in real estate. His core message: catching a deepfake takes a tool built and trained specifically to spot one, not a general-purpose AI tool asked to do a job it was never designed for.

Three Different Angles on the Same Threat

The panel paired three distinct vantage points on the same problem.

Pat Kinsel brings the digital identity angle. He founded Proof (formerly Notarize) after his own frustrating experience trying to notarize a document, with a mission to make notarization simpler, smarter, and more secure than paper. Proof pioneered the online notarization industry and completed the country's first fully online mortgage closing in 2017. The platform has since added cryptographic verification and deepfake and forgery detection to secure every interaction. Kinsel previously worked as a partner at Polaris Partners and co-founded Spindle, which Twitter acquired in 2013.

Tracey Hawkins, known as "the Safety Lady," brings the human and physical safety angle. A former real estate agent, she has spent more than 26 years teaching agents to work safely. She writes on real estate safety for The Close and contributes to NAR's REALTOR® Magazine, NARPM, and RIS Media. She founded Safety and Security Source in Kansas City in 1995.

Fahsel brings the listing-fraud angle, the vantage point closest to what happens inside an MLS the moment a fraudulent seller tries to get a listing live.

Why Can't Generic AI Tools Catch Deepfakes?

Fahsel's central point on the panel was direct: a chatbot or general-purpose AI model was never trained to recognize the specific signals a deepfake leaves behind, whether in a voice, a video call, or a scanned ID. Catching those signals takes a tool trained specifically to look for them, the same way a dedicated spam filter catches more than a person scanning an inbox by eye. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has warned that fraudsters are already using fake identification, spoofed emails, and generated phone numbers to impersonate property owners, a pattern that gets harder to catch by eye as the fakes improve.

Ownership Verification Was Built to Catch What Generic Tools Miss

Property Shield's Ownership Verification is that kind of purpose-built tool. Available to agents at the point of listing creation and triggered by the client's MLS or brokerage, it initiates biometric and ID scanning trained specifically to detect deepfakes and discrepancies against public county records, then notifies the agent of what it finds so they can review it before committing more time or marketing spend to the listing. REsides, Inc. became the first MLS in the nation to offer Ownership Verification directly to its subscribers, giving agents exactly this kind of purpose-built check before a property is ever listed.

The Industry's Leading Voices Are Already Comparing Notes

A panel with an identity-verification founder, a safety educator, and Property Shield's own CEO comparing notes in public is a signal in itself. The people building the industry's response to deepfakes agree on the same point: catching one takes a tool built for the job, not a general one asked to improvise.

Anyone who missed the live session can still watch the full panel discussion on tech.realtor, including the full exchange between Kinsel, Hawkins, and Fahsel on where generic AI tools fall short.