first published week of: 05/23/2016
When a single father and ex-Marine in Oakland, Mich., went to pay back taxes on his home, he was told he didn't have to – because he no longer owned the property. A victim of real estate fraud, he went to court to get his house back.
That case shed light on a more widespread problem in which a blank deed is filled out claiming that the property owner is transferring the property to someone else. Once the document is notarized and a fee is paid to the recorder of deeds, the document is part of the official record of ownership. Armed with a fraudulent deed, con artists can take out big mortgages and disappear. Or fraudsters can file a lien without the legitimate owners’ knowledge, get a default judgment in court and walk away with the deed to the property.
Lisa Brown, Oakland County’s register of deeds, wanted to stop this kind of real estate fraud. She contracted with Xerox to help develop the Property Records Notification (PRN) system, in which users create accounts, flag keywords they want to monitor and then create an alert to receive email alerts when changes are recorded on the properties they are tracking. It’s the first of its kind, she said. continued…