quote:

Originally posted by Outdoorsman:
This thread got me thinking, the wife and I paid off our mortgage about 3 years ago. We did get a letter from the mortgage company stating it was paid off. Should we have received some sort of title or deed after we made our final payment?

quote:

Originally posted by Timdogg6:
I have been a title attorney in Florida for 18 years. Anyone saying that this does not happen just has no concept of the crime and how it is committed and therefore believes it does not happen.

I get notifications from my underwriters almost weekly of properties where this is happening in Florida. A quick check of my email shows 3 properties yesterday, 9 on 3/13, 1 on 3/7, 1 on 3/6 and 1 on 3/4.

Relying on a notary stamp is a joke. They are easily forged and or you can utilize a remote online notary and present a fake ID and get your document notarized easily. These often come from Virginia which has a lower threshold for the KBA portion of their notary verification.

I had a client who had 5 multifamily buildings mortgaged without his knowledge and the scammers got about 3 million in cash, it took him 3 years to get the liens satisfied and cost him around $200,000 in legal to get it all cleaned up.

If your county has a title notification service, sign up for it immediately. But this is often after the fact notice. The best thing to protect yourself is this keep a mortgage on your property so it will ping on a title search. If you own property without a mortgage, go get a line of credit on it. If you own vacant land, sign up for title lock. These scams are far more likely on vacant land than occupied property.

States like Florida which have all of their land records online will be far more likely to have this happen. Although I do know of 2 such crimes which happened in Rhode Island where their title records are examined in person.

This is a crime that you need to take seriously.