NYC Opens First Office to Fight Deed Theft

It is the city’s first office dedicated to deed theft prevention. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has just formed the Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention for New York City.

What’s deed theft? It’s the taking of a home by shady paperwork. The culprits falsify deeds and notarizations. Then they record the falsified documents. Additional forms of deed fraud include the filing of mortgages or other liens against a home’s title without the owner’s knowledge or consent.

Deed thieves sell the properties they take, or they rent them out. Some fraudsters actually evict people from the households whose deeds they have stolen.

A Persistent, Intolerable Threat

Since 2014, thousands of people have been targeted for deed theft in New York City. The mayor calls deed theft “a persistent threat” to those who can least afford the loss.

Now, Mamdani vows that New York City “will not tolerate the exploitation of our communities.” The person assigned to help keep that promise is attorney Peter White of Access Justice Brooklyn.

White has years of experience in defending deed holders from fraud and manipulation, and will lead New York City’s new deed theft prevention office.

White, together with the city’s finance commissioner, is empowered to:

• Develop a “whole-of-government approach” to prevent, detect, and deal with deed theft.

• Work with the courts to inform the handling of potential deed theft cases.

• Collaborate with agencies including the New York City Sheriff’s Office, its Law Department, and its District Attorneys’ Offices, as well as the New York City Commission on Human Rights, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protections, and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

White may bring in other agencies and partners as needed. The Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention will be located in the Department of Finance, where deeds are recorded.

Executive Order 16

The mayor signed an Executive Order to form the new entity and empower its director. It authorizes wide-ranging action, including:

• Maintaining systems to prevent deed manipulation. This involves checking for suspicious filings at the city deed recorder’s office. This will also include systematic reviews of property records and other documents, to ferret out signs of potential deed theft.

• Responding collaboratively with law enforcement and among city agencies. For example, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez promises to “investigate these cases, prosecute when the conduct is criminal, and work closely with the Office of Deed Theft Prevention and our partners to help Brooklyn homeowners in distress.”

• Sharing information among and between city and state agencies. In this way, Mayor Mamdani’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention “will fight alongside our office to eliminate deed theft in New York State,” said state Assemblymember Landon Dais. (Some background: For the past few years, New York State’s Attorney General Letitia James has directed resources into naming and confronting cases of deed theft. In 2024, James co-authored a law giving the AG a direct channel to prosecute deed theft. Last year, James used this enforcement power to prosecute deed theft from a Queens resident in hospice care.)

• Performing an outreach and teaching role. This will involve “coordination with relevant agencies and community partners, with particular focus on neighborhoods where deed theft is most prevalent.”

• Registering residents throughout the city in the current alert system. Alerts promptly notify the registered deed holder of activity affecting a title.

• Accepting and acting on deed holder complaints. That is, helping fraud victims report exploitive activity. Also, helping them “navigate the correction of records and related property tax relief processes where applicable.”

The new office will have the resources both to prevent and to effectively respond to fraud. It will give residents legal and administrative support. And, as state Assemblymember Stefani Zinerman has said, it will offer residents “a clear path to reclaim and keep what is rightfully theirs.” 

A Matter of Safety and Civil Rights

L. Joy Williams leads the NAACP New York State Conference. In the Office of the Mayor’s press release, Williams notes that Black homeowners are frequent targets of deed manipulation. This pattern systematically cuts into generational wealth in ways that become “coordinated assaults on the stability of our neighborhoods.”

Christine Clarke chairs the NYC Commission on Human Rights. Clarke observes that “many Black families build generational wealth through homeownership.” The unjust loss of a home is tragic for the deed holder, and harms their children and grandchildren. James Inniss, with New York Communities for Change, notes that households led by Black women were the hardest hit in the 2008-09 foreclosure crisis. That’s largely because so many of these households had to cope with predatory mortgages. The last thing Black communities need is to become central targets of deed manipulation, Inniss says.  

And yet deed theft reports in New York—both the state and the city—have reached record numbers in this decade. The shift to online documents has come with new methods of falsifying all types of IDs and legal filings. So, deed theft is becoming easier to do. It’s also become more obvious that it’s happening, as people share their stories over social media, and news outlets share them online.

Some Black and immigrant households might have left deed theft unreported in the past. Today, “people are hearing that they have a voice,” says Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz.

The Housing and Worker Protection Bureau, introduced by Katz in 2020, has been instrumental in getting deeds back in the hands of their rightful owners.

Like Katz, community-based advocates for fairness and housing equality hope that the Mayor’s initiative will bring justice for the many households that have lost their deeds to swindlers—or are currently vulnerable. This Executive Order was developed in collaboration with local advocates, including the People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft. The people whose situations have led to this work live throughout New York City, especially in Queens and in Central Brooklyn, specifically Bed-Stuy, East New York, and Crown Heights.

Future Goals

Following the mayor’s Executive Order 16, New York City has announced plans to explore future law and policy reforms. It will be interesting to watch what unfolds. Meanwhile, we are heartened to know that the rights of New York City’s deed holders are being taken seriously. As the Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation & Development said in the mayor’s press release, “New York homeowners deserve to sleep at night” without worrying about whether their most important asset has been swiped from them.