There must be a claim for damages in order to file a civil case for Fraud.
If I claim my outhouse is worth a million dollars and a bank loans me the money on the basis of my assertion that it is worth a million dollars, there are no damages unless I don’t pay the loan off.
And if I don’t pay it back, the bank has to prove that they only issued the loan based on my material misrepresentation. If they didn’t actually rely on my claim and did their own due diligence to get an independent appraiser to appraise the property then they might have a suit against their appraiser.
If a bank fails to do their own due diligence in verifying the value of the property, they would be estopped from claiming they were defrauded.
It’s damned hard to prove fraud.
On other thing, if a bank loans you a million dollars using your outhouse as collateral, that is prima facie evidence that the value of the property at the time the bank loaned the money was at least a million dollars.
Good summary