Deed Fraud Archives

January 20, 2023January 20, 2023

Heirs, Protect the Seniors in Your Life From Deed Theft

A 91-year-old Floridian recently sent a payment to his insurer. Then the agent called to say the company wouldn’t be able to renew the homeowner’s policy. The deed had been transferred. The home was now legally owned by another person.

Some days later, from his bedroom, this shocked and disoriented senior heard three people come into the home. It seems the perpetrator was trying to sell the house. Fort Lauderdale police are investigating.

The swindled senior paid off the mortgage 15 years ago. Maybe that’s part of the issue. If there were a mortgage lien on the home, the mortgage company would have been alerted to the transfer. Plenty of elders live in homes with paid-off mortgages in Florida, and plenty of fraudulent schemes are targeting their increasingly valuable homes.

November 23, 2022November 23, 2022

New Fraud Fighter: The Good DEED Act

Deed fraud infects cities and counties all over the United States. This kind of fraud involves forging a deed, impersonating someone who holds a title to a home, or falsely authorizing a transfer of real estate ownership. It’s essentially a home-stealing scheme.

Now, lawmakers are taking action to make life harder for deed thieves. In October 2022, U.S. Representative Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, along with Rep. Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania, introduced H.R. 9192, the Good Documentation and Enforcement of Estate Deeds Act. The Good DEED Act, for short.

October 20, 2022October 19, 2022

Deed Scam Update: Fake Documents Transfer Dead Floridians’ Houses

In Daytona Beach, a suspect has pleaded “not guilty” to organized fraud. The crime involved two homes, stolen by deed fraud, with multiple notaries enlisted as part of the scheme.

The Volusia County, Florida suspect faces a first-degree felony charge, punishable by up to 30 years in prison. He is accused of creating fraudulent quitclaim deeds indicating that prior property owners (who are dead) had willingly transferred their homes.

July 6, 2022July 6, 2022

Stealing Houses: A Fast-Growing Crime?

Or just an especially inhuman one?

Several recent stories paint a complex picture.

November 22, 2021November 22, 2021

Deeds Scams Are Ruining Lives

Person dressed as a burglar trying to open a house door with a crow bar.

Panic in Detroit

Detroit should have had its moratorium on foreclosures a decade ago. Years of overzealous tax foreclosures has brought the city a decade of deed scams with no end in sight. And the wrongdoers are rarely apprehended for wrecking people’s lives.

October 8, 2021October 8, 2021

The Mansion Snatchers

Once upon a time in 2020, a Texas couple named Maria and Michael bought a $5.75 million-dollar waterside home in Redington Shores, Florida. They had no idea the deed had already been transferred to the Aura Church — by forgery.

A forged need carries a fake signature (or several) and a notary stamp. The forger typically has it recorded by a county or city recorder of deeds. This was the case here. The notarial acknowledgements were faked, and so were the witnesses’ signatures, according to those whose names were used. The lawyer who supposedly prepared the deed? Well, even lawyers can be victims of identity theft.

September 15, 2021September 15, 2021

Amid New York City’s Rampant Deed Theft, One Victim Wins

Brooklyn property values are going up. And there are plenty of opportunists looking to steal deeds. In the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn in New York City, Dairus Griffiths just triumphed over those opportunists.

In the past decade, Brooklyn has lost many of its Black and Hispanic residents, as gentrification reshapes the district. Serial fraudsters and their limited liability companies aren’t making life any easier for longtime residents. They scour public records for the most vulnerable and indebted homeowners.

Deed cheats use the shell company structure to blur the identities of holders. The manipulators lie to their targets; they forge deeds; and they move houses from one LLC to the next. Identifying and charging these manipulators becomes very hard to do.

July 16, 2021July 16, 2021

“Particularly Insidious”: Update on House Theft in Philadelphia

Person walking into a house carrying a newspaper and a soft briefcase. — Deed fraud and house theft are particularly insidious crimes because they not only impact the home’s real owner and often their family, but also sap generational wealth from them as well as their communities, driving poverty and desperation.
— Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner, quoted by NBC10 Philadelphia on March 22, 2021.

Something strange happened in Philly early in 2014. The late Norman Johnson signed a deed from the grave, transferring a South Philadelphia rowhouse for only $15,000 to Amen Brown. Dawn Presbery, the daughter of the deceased and the home’s real owner, fought for two years to recover the deed.

In some cases like this, the D.A. prosecutes, and the person named on the deed ultimately has to sign a new deed to restore the title to its rightful owner. Here, the forgery was pursued in the criminal courts, but the case against Brown was thrown out.

Brown claims to have parted with the $15,000 at the urging of a scammer on Craigslist. But regardless of Brown’s story, as Max Marin noted for Billy Penn, it’s astonishing that even criminal charges didn’t induce Brown to return the house title to its rightful owner.

The Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas finally ordered the forged deed returned to Dawn Presbery. Later, with remarkable chutzpah, Brown won an election to Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives, assumed office on December 1, 2020, and set out this year to pass tough-on-crime bills and to defend the rights of homeowners to keep their homes.

December 16, 2020December 13, 2020

Can Hackers Take the Title to Your Home?

Know the Signs. Prevent Identity Fraud.

The title to your home is a precious document. It proves that you own your home and that you may borrow money against your home equity. Can internet hackers take it from you?

Cybercriminals are highly sophisticated. In 2020, they were able to hack into top cybersecurity firms that do business with the U.S. government. Three years earlier, hackers got into a credit reporting company’s database. The Equifax breach exposed personal details of about 143 million people.

Assume that your social security number, birth date and other key identification numbers may have been exposed at some time. And if you’ve had the deed to your home recorded, your signature is in a database, too. But while we all could be vulnerable, knowledge is power. Here’s what to know about how title snatchers work, and how to safeguard your identity and your homeownership.