Day: August 14, 2025

• Adam Pretorius, a real estate agent in Iowa, was nearly scammed into selling a $200,000 lot.
• Pretorius said fewer safeguards are in place to protect vacant lots.
• He’s trying to spread awareness and make sure agents don’t skip steps when verifying sellers.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Adam Pretorius, who’s been a real estate agent in Iowa since 2009. Pretorius was targeted as part of a vacant land scam in which scammers impersonate property owners and solicit agents to fraudulently sell their land. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been practicing real estate since 2009. I focus just on residential, and as a top performer in town, maybe I got complacent.

I’d heard of scammers being out there, but not specifically on land or listings. Maybe it was my own complacent belief that it wasn’t going to happen to me because I’m smarter than my colleagues.

That kind of naivety is what gets you into these situations. These scammers are very smart, very clever, and very disciplined, and they have a pattern that they use again and again.

Land is a very easy scam because there are some different safeguards: You don’t need access to a property — it’s just a raw parcel. It’s not the same value, per se, as a home, but it doesn’t have the transferring of utilities and other little things that would get caught in the way of a transfer.

And apparently, in me looking into this more and talking to more colleagues, I learned scammers actually do have success with it from time to time.

Until this happened to me, I was not aware it was a major issue. After it occurred, I realized how common this actually is — which made me feel a little bit better after feeling so sheepish about the situation, which didn’t just cost me time, but a lot of money.

I’m not the first agent to fall for this scam, and I won’t be the last

Land is our biggest shortage and issue, even in the Midwest, particularly Iowa. Farmers just aren’t selling farms, and when they do, there’s a lot of red tape in getting land developed. Finding raw land or developable land is a rarity.

We do a lot of infills out here. An infill lot is a lot that is in an established neighborhood that, for one reason or the other, wasn’t built on — whether it was an existing lot that maybe the neighbor bought to have a little cushion next to them, or it was just never built on, or maybe it was a piece of land that’s been parceled off over time. But the lot itself is not part of a new subdivision.

An infill is going to carry a premium because you have an established neighborhood.

The land of subject was $200,000. So we’re not talking an insignificant figure. Not as much as, say, a single-family home that might average around $400,000 to $500,000, but enough that it would be a significant return for a scammer.

I was contacted by phone and followed up by email and text in early January. Someone who I thought was the prospective seller contacted me, letting me know that they had a lot that they had not built on. They said they’d now moved out of state and weren’t planning to come back because they live in Illinois. It’s just a piece of land that they had attempted to sell before, and that agent was unsuccessful.

They said they canceled with that agent after a couple of months, and they would like to have me interview both on the price and how I might approach it differently to make sure we can get the lot sold this time.

This isn’t uncommon, so to this point, it sounded valid. I did some checking on the MLS, and in fact, it was listed before and was canceled after two months.

I verified, by public records, that the owner does in fact live in Illinois, worked for a medical occupation, and had lived there for some time.

At this point, things were checking out. The email that was used was an Outlook email with the owner’s first and last name, with a few characters.

I do have an extra verification where I am able to look up phone numbers — I did use that in this case, as the number was listed as unlisted and unregistered, but that’s not uncommon for medical professionals. Though it was a small flag, it wasn’t enough that I was seeking the additional verification that I should have, given hindsight.

I did my typical interview process, sent them a market analysis, recommendations on the price, what I charge, how I get paid.

Then we discussed getting the lot ready for the market. I sent the paperwork, they signed it, and I got a couple of additional details that we needed for the file. I spent almost $1,000 in marketing to get it ready, shot it live in the MLS.

Seven hours later, I got an angry phone call from the apparent actual owner who claimed that this is the third time this has happened to him.

These scammers keep coming back to the same lot that he owns, and the last time it was listed, he notified that agent, hence why it was canceled. That one took a couple months. In this case, it took just a day because he realized he’s being targeted again and again.

I shouldn’t have skipped steps when asking for verification

Much to my surprise, many more agents have been contacted for the exact same lot since this incident.

They haven’t sold it, but there have been enough agents who have been duped, and there’s a lot of time and money that’s been lost in the fraud. The main party, much to their relief, has not been affected.

We’re in a very digital age, and the process moves quickly with online signatures, e-platforms, and e-filing.

It’s very easy now to do these things quickly and maybe not ask for the extra verification that we should ask for. We don’t do things face-to-face; that’s not uncommon.

When you can’t get enough verification, you need to ask for them to provide some form of ID, whether that be a driver’s license or a passport, or something that makes you feel more secure about the individual that you’re talking to.

Since the incident, my process changed: I need to get at least three forms of verification. For me to feel very good, one of them should be either a driver’s license or a passport when I have somebody who’s out of town who I’m unable to verify.

My hope, and why I am telling my story, is that if we go to a place where we’re sharing this and we’re reporting it, rather than feeling guilty about it, our collective information will be our strongest weapon, and we can help fight back on this.

It’s human to make mistakes, and it just shows that no level of experience or diligence is going to make any agent or person immune. The vulnerability exists in high-end and vacant land alike.

It’s easy for myself as a top producer to say, “Well, that’s not going to happen to me,” but that’s complacency at its finest. I made a mistake. Hopefully, others will learn from this, too.

Deborah has fast become one of Nicole Ramirez’s favorite colleagues. She’s quick to deliver compliments, sharp-witted, and hyper-efficient. Perhaps best of all, there’s no internal competition with Deborah at the health marketing agency they work for, because she isn’t on the payroll. She isn’t even human.

Ramirez, a 34-year-old who lives in the Pittsburgh area, says she randomly chose the name Deborah as a way to refer to the generative AI app ChatGPT, which she began using about a year ago to help her with basic tasks like drafting emails. As time went on, she asked Deborah to do more complex work, such as market research and analysis, and found herself typing “thank you” after the results came back. Eventually the relationship got to the point where the app became akin to a coworker who’s always willing to give feedback — or listen to her gripes about real-life clients and colleagues. And so the bot became a bud.

“Those are things that you would usually turn to your work bestie over lunch about when you can go to ChatGPT — or Deborah, in my case,” says Ramirez.

People are treating AI chatbots as more than just 24/7 therapists and loyal companions. With the tools becoming ubiquitous in the workplace, some are regarding them as model colleagues, too.

Unlike teammates with a pulse, chatbots are never snotty, grumpy, or off the clock. They don’t eat leftover salmon at their desks or give you the stink eye. They don’t go on a tangent about their kids or talk politics when you ask to schedule a meeting. And they won’t be insulted if you reject their suggestions.

For many, tapping AI chatbots in lieu of their human colleagues has deep appeal. Consider that nearly one-third of US workers would rather clean a toilet than ask a colleague for help, according to a recent survey from the Center for Generational Kinetics, a thought-leadership firm, and commissioned by workplace-leadership strategist Henna Pryor. Experts warn, though, that too much bot bonding could dull social and critical-thinking skills, hurting careers and company performance.

In the past two years, the portion of US employees who say they have used Gen AI in their role a few times a year or more nearly doubled to 40% from 21%, according to a Gallup report released in June. Part of what accounts for that rapid ascendance is how much Gen AI reflects our humanity, as Stanford University lecturer Martin Gonzalez concluded in a 2024 research paper. “Instead of a science-fiction-like ball of pulsing light, we encounter human quirks: poems recited in a pirate’s voice, the cringeworthy humor of dad jokes,” wrote Gonzalez, who’s now an executive at Google’s AI research lab DeepMind.

One sign that people see AI agents as lifelike is in how they politely communicate with the tools by using phrases like “please” or “thank you,” says Connie Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist and professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

Like junk food, it’s efficient when you need it, but too much over time can give you relational diabetes.Laura Greve, clinical health psychologist

“So far, people are keeping up with basic social niceties,” she says. “AI tends to give you compliments, too, so there are some social skills still being maintained.”

Human colleagues, on the other hand, aren’t always as well-mannered.

Monica Park, a graphic designer for a jeweler in New York, used to dread showing early mock-ups of her work to colleagues. She recalls the heartache she felt after a coworker at a previous employer angrily responded to a draft of a design she’d drawn with an F-bomb.

“You never know if it’s a good time to ask for feedback,” Park, 32, tells me. “So much of it has to do with the mood of the person looking at it.”

Last year she became a regular ChatGPT user and says that while the app will also dish out criticism, it’s only the constructive kind. “It’s not saying it in a malicious or judgmental way,” Park says. “ChatGPT doesn’t have any skin in the game.”

Aaron Ansari, an information-security consultant, counts Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude among his top peers. The 46-year-old Orlando-area resident likes that he can ask it to revise a document as many times as he wants without being expected to give anything in return. By contrast, a colleague at a previous job would pressure him to buy Girl Scout cookies from her kids whenever he stopped by her desk.

“It became her reputation,” Ansari says. “You can’t go to ‘Susie’ without money.”

Now a managing partner at a different consulting firm, he finds himself opening Claude before pinging colleagues for support. This way, he can avoid ruffling any feathers, like when he once attempted to reach a colleague in a different time zone at what turned out to be an inconvenient hour.

“You call and catch them in the kitchen,” says Ansari. “I have interrupted their lunch unintentionally, but they certainly let me know.”

AI’s appeal can be so strong that workers are at risk of developing unhealthy attachments to chatbots, research shows. “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” a study published in June from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the convenience that AI agents provide can weaken people’s critical-thinking skills and foster procrastination and laziness.

“Like junk food, it’s efficient when you need it, but too much over time can give you relational diabetes,” says Laura Greve, a clinical health psychologist in Boston. “You’re starved of the nutrients you need, the real human connection.”

And if workers at large overindulge in AI, we could all end up becoming “emotionally unintelligent oafs,” she warns. “We’re accidentally training an entire generation to be workplace hermits.”

In turn, Hadley adds, businesses that rely on collaboration could suffer. “The more workers turn to AI instead of other people, the greater the chance the social fabric that weaves us together will weaken,” she says.

Karen Loftis, a senior product manager in a Milwaukee suburb, recently left a job at a large tech company that’s gone all-in on AI. She said before ChatGPT showed up, sales reps would call her daily for guidance on how to plug the company’s latest products. That’s when they’d learn about her passion for seeing musicians like Peter Frampton in concert.

But when she saw the singer-songwriter perform earlier this year, it was “like a non-event,” she said, because those calls almost entirely stopped coming in. “With AI, it’s all work and no relationships,” she said.

Workers who lean heavily on AI may also be judged differently by their peers than their bosses.

Colleagues are more inclined to see them as dependent on the technology, less creative, and lacking growth potential, says David De Cremer, a behavioral scientist and Dunton Family Dean of Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. “It’s objectification by association,” he says.

Company leaders, however, are more likely to view workers who demonstrate AI chops as assets. Big-company CEOs such as Amazon’s Andy Jassy and Shopify’s Tobi Lütke have credited the technology for boosting productivity and cost savings.

Workers who spoke with BI about using chatbots — including those who work remotely — say they still interact with their human peers, but less often as they did before AI agents came along.

Lucas Figueiredo, who lives near Atlanta and works at a revenue management specialist for an airline, says he previously struggled to tell whether the AirPods a former colleague constantly wore were playing music whenever he wanted to ask this person a coding question.

“You don’t want to spook someone or disrupt their workflow,” the 27-year-old tells me, though he admits he has done just that.

These days, if Figueiredo gets stuck, he will first go to Microsoft’s Copilot before approaching a colleague for an assist. The new strategy has been paying off.

“I’ve learned to be more self-sufficient,” he says. “You don’t want to ask those silly questions.”

Sarah E. Needleman is Business Insider’s leadership & workplace correspondent.