It’s highly likely that your home is the most valuable possession you own – and when you receive unexpected alerts notifying court filings related to your home’s title it can be frightening, to say the least. Unfortunately, home title theft is a growing crime as scamsters can easily access property data online from public records. Here’s a closer look at why home title monitoring services like TitleShield™ and Home Title Lock are so important: What is home title monitoring? A home title monitoring is a subscription service that protects your home title from con artists. Home title theft is a g ..read more

In 2008, the FBI warned homeowners about home title theft. As per the FBI, the scam combines identity theft and mortgage fraud and usually happens in three steps: Scamsters find a home they want to target They steal the identity of the legitimate owner of the property by creating forged documentation They transfer the home title to their name by forging the property owner’s signature and using fake witnesses Unfortunately, home title theft is still prevalent today. We estimate as many as 10,000 home title theft claims are made every year in the United States. Here we answer some of the frequ ..read more

Is it possible for scammers to steal your home right out from under your nose? Sadly, the answer is yes. It was in 2008 when the FBI first reported on the scam, calling it house stealing. The Bureau described it as a mix of two popular scams – identity theft and mortgage fraud. In the present day, we estimate as 10,000 home title theft claims are made every year in the United States. You would be surprised to know that merely in the County of Los Angeles (where TitleShield™ was created), approximately 500 reports of real estate crimes are reported every year. How does real estate title theft g ..read more

Full disclosure: I don’t work for Home Title Lock, and I am not a paid spokesperson for the company like Newt Gingrich. However, I know a lot about home title theft because I have battled this crime as a lawyer since 2003. Too often, I see YouTube videos, in which self-appointed deed fraud experts tell their viewers that there is nothing to worry about and they don’t need a title monitoring service. They. Are. Wrong. Is the cost of a home title monitoring service like TitleShield™ and Home Title Lock cost worth it? The short answer is: Yes. Think about this: Almost every homeowner has homeowne ..read more

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. It was obvious that this was a new subject for them, and they got some things right and some things wrong. 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. However, they truly understated the seriousness of the crime, primarily because they have very little experience with ..read more

We all know what identity theft is and some of us know how it is committed, but how many people stop to think about what criminals use the stolen identities for? Here is my list of the top 5 worst crimes that are committed with stolen personal identifiable information (PII). Hackers and fraudsters constantly seek new ways to steal identities. Specifically, they want to steal personally identifiable information (PII) that they can then use to fraudulently buy goods, services or property. Some of these crimes are nothing more than an inconvenience to the victims (like fraudulent purchases with s ..read more

My perspective on title insurance differs from almost everybody else because I have never worked in the title insurance business. Instead, I have prosecuted real estate fraud cases as a deputy district attorney and litigated them as a trial attorney since 2003, and in most of these cases, the title insurance policies came into play. Every homebuyer MUST BUY a Homeowner’s Policy of Title Insurance for the reasons I will now explain. When you buy a home, typically you buy it from a person that you don’t know personally, and typically you have no personal knowledge about the history of the home ..read more

As I mentioned in my previous article about mortgage fraud, in this series I will describe other criminal behavior that accompanies the crime of property title fraud, one of which is Financial Elder Abuse. Not surprisingly, you can find examples of the financial exploitation of elderly people in many contexts, and this article will provide a mere sampling of these crimes. I was actually interviewed about this topic by The List TV, and I explained why older folks tend to fall victim to fraudsters. It seems like every day we read about a scam that targets senior citizens, and any theft or fraud ..read more

When a criminal misappropriates a property title with a fake deed, he also has to commit other crimes to complete his fraudulent scheme. This article about mortgage fraud is the first of a series in which I will explain these other violations of the law. Fraudsters know that mortgage fraud is one of the most lucrative crimes, and it is easy to commit. By lying to a mortgage lender to obtain a loan, a con artist can steal 100s of 1000s of dollars. It doesn’t matter that the real property exists as collateral for the loan. It doesn’t matter if the lender gets back. Once the lender transfers mone ..read more

I have been fighting property title fraud since 2003, and notaries public played integral parts in every case…but not in the way you think. The victims of real estate scams almost always assume that the notary was complicit in the crime, but in my experience, this is almost never true. In most cases, the con artist victimized the notary too. There is one major exception to this rule: fraud by fake notario publicos. As I discuss below, notario fraud is a version of affinity fraud, in which con artists from Latin American countries take advantage of their fellow ex-patriots here in the United St ..read more