[FICO]

Yes it is an API lookup to verify the LLC's authorized persons, for Florida: http://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/ByName

These people sound like professional swindlers, you can buy someone's identity on the darknet for a couple hundred dollars at the most. They almost certainly filled out the rental application using someone else's information. That was implied in TFA.

Property ownership is very trivial to check. Calling city/town hall when a property is listed is not an unreasonable task for a multi-million dollar company, more like the bare minimum due diligence. If they can manage to send out professional photographers they can manage basic ownership verification.

[x0x0]

You skipped entirely over trusts. Property managers are regularly not named members of an LLC. To wit, I'm a manager of an apartment building that I (quite unfortunately) don't have any ownership interest in. Building a state-by-state, or county-by-county lookup system; verifying person X is authorized to make decisions for a property; then detecting updates is decidedly non-trivial. You can skip googling since I already know the answer: there's very limited information available in many states on corporations. See eg Delaware. Other states don't require updates, or require updates only on very long periods. Many small LLCs simply skip even required annual updates. There's also complications such as the address used by the building and even the postal service is quite possibly not the recorded address. In 2015, [1] claims there were 550k property listings in the US alone. None of this can't be done, but trivial it isn't. I happen to know much of this because I used to work on address information.

[1] http://blog.airdna.co/2015-in-review-airbnb-data-for-the-usa...