Be suspicious of any unsolicited communication asking for personal information. Make sure you shred any documents that have your bank account information, Social Security/Social Insurance number, or other personal information. Be careful with your personal information. Treat your personal information like the valuable commodity it is.The BBB and the news stations also made some good recommendations, including these: In order to profit from this incident of identity theft, they either have to take out a mortgage or sell the property to unsuspecting buyers. They might even steal the notary’s identity and forge the notary’s signature and stamp as well. To commit this crime, a fraudster has to steal the identity of the homeowner and forge that person’s name on a fraudulent deed. The most important thing that the BBB representatives got right is that home title theft is a type of identity theft. In a previous article, I explained why this crime is so easy. You can assume that if these two organized crime groups have begun to use stolen home equity as a source of funds, others have too. They tell me that in the Los Angeles area, Russian and Armenian criminal syndicates have discovered home title theft as an easy and extremely lucrative way to make money. ![]() As a former white collar criminal prosecutor, I still have a lot of friends who are fraud detectives. However, I have reason to believe the number of cases is about to explode. What this means is that there is no way to know with certainty whether the crime of home title theft is growing in frequency. Unfortunately, nobody keeps nationwide statistics on these claims, and hopefully sometime soon the FBI will begin to do so. And, the title insurance industry pay between $200M and $400M in claims based on title fraud every year. According to the New York Times, homeowners in Brooklyn filed 3,000 deed fraud complaints between 20. In a recent news report, an assistant county prosecutor in Dallas, Texas said that his office had found 90 incidents of deed fraud in the last couple years. Deed fraud is very real.Īnd, don’t just take my word for it. Although there are no nationwide statistics about home title fraud, there is a growing body of evidence in various jurisdictions that it is increasing in frequency.Īs I’ve said on many previous occasions, I have personally fought home title fraud since 2003 – first as a real estate fraud prosecutor, then as a private attorney, and now as the CEO of a tech company that creates fraud prevention technology. Those of us who battle it in court and who know real victims understand that this crime can be devastating to homeowners. However, they truly understated the seriousness of the crime, primarily because they have very little experience with deed fraud. The Better Business Bureau (BBB) representatives acknowledged that home title fraud is an issue, and they provided some useful tips to homeowners about how to protect their identities. It was obvious that this was a new subject for them, and they got some things right and some things wrong. Two chapters of the Better Business Bureau recently appeared on local news stations in northern Alabama and northeast Louisiana to talk about home title theft and title monitoring services.
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