The Expert Podcast

So what is deed theft And can you actually steal a house Well here's what happens in a lot of areas. there's a process where fraudsters and scammers can review real estate records and forge a deed transfer and end up owning a property for free In this case, there was a group of people who stole a bunch of homes worth a million dollars How does this work? Well if you are a scammer, you can access property records through a public records research So…all real estate records are considered public documents. Since title. are public.

You can see everything about that title or in that deed ownership the name of the owner, their address if there's any mortgages, if they have a absentee ownership meaning that if the mailing address for their tax bill is different than their property address that can be found in the land records. Well how does that help you Well, If you can find a property. Where the ownership owned it for cash and there's no mortgage. And the N the address on their tax bill is different than the property address. Then you could assume that it's an ad.

owner where they live somewhere else and they have no mortgage So what you do is you create a property deed Now one thing that people don't realize about property deeds. Is there created from blank sheets of paper They're not like an official document or a certificate. It's a deed that's typed up on somebody's computer. And it's signed by the owner, filed with the county. And now the property's transfer So what these scammers will do.

Is, they will look up the owner Joe Schmoe. And they will create a deed transferring the property from Joe Schmo to some fake company. And they will forge a signature for Joe Schmoe and they have what the signature looks like because when the person bought the property there's a signature on that deed where they signed for it. So they could fake the signature get two witnesses that are just made up people. And now they file that deed.

Well, one thing about property deeds is the county recorder The clerk is not able to verify signatures They're not the police they're not the court are not a forensics analyst They're just a clerk. And they just if a deeds Presented and it looks like it makes sense They file it…

Now the deeds filed Now it shows that this property was transferred from Joe Schmoe to XYZ investments. And now the scammers will put that property for sale. And…they'll put it on Zillow They'll put it on Redfin or they'll get a mortgage on it because now it's free and clear and they'll take the cash. Or the lien or they'll sell it. And they'll run away with the money.

Now this property owner starts getting notices Hey your property was sold. There's a lien on it You owe payments and they don't know anything about it So they run a title search and find out that there was a deed theft. On their property. Now many times it can be undone. Sometimes it can't.

What if it was sold to an innocent third party that just paid good money for it Not knowing it was a scam. Right. Those are the kinds of scenarios that resolve from deed fraud. So this could be a real problem If you're the property owner and you discover your property has been sold or has a mortgage on it, you have to go through a lot of steps to undo it. And it may require getting the courts involved.

getting a lawyer spending a lot of money and the people who took the money they're long gone right They usually use fake IDs and fake, account numbers to get this money out And you're probably not going to find them. So. How can you prevent this One thing you can do is you can file a notice of intent on your deed You can check with an attorney or check with the legalities of your county. you can file a. notice of freeze on your, on your deed so that if anybody sees that they know that they're looking for a release of that before they transfer the property.

But it's not uncommon Usually it's on houses that have no mortgages. and a house that has an absentee owner. And if you're an investor or a purchaser of property, make sure that you perform due diligence on the seller that you have good ideas Don't rely on copies. And you have an escrow company that knows what they're doing This particular alleged scheme used, disbarred attorneys that were getting fake social security numbers and fake driver's licenses So deed fraud is. Not gone It's still running It's still out there.

And it's something that you want to be aware of So you don't get caught up in losing money in a scam.