Hmmmmmm.... 5 minute commute time to the office... lovely city views....

Hello new apartment!!!! enormous apartment... >_<

That old joke about selling a certain bridge has a new twist now.

hehehehe...i wonder if we can do that with the white house...that would be a hell of an apartment. lol

It is pretty amazing that the clerk at the office didn't take one look and be like "350 5th ave? WTF are you smoking?"

This may say more about the stupidity of government employees than the cunning of con artists.

Didn't some guy send checks to a bunch of jurisdictions and put in the memo line "for ownership of such & such a building" and all of them cashed the checks.

Since the original documents were forged and not properly notarized, doesn't it make everything void?

@BlondeGrlz is having a BlondeBoyz!: Especially considering they used Fay Wray as a witness! You mean it didn't dawn on somebody that that was a wee bit peculiar?

@Git Em SteveDave loves this guy->★:

The object is not to actually gain ownership of the building, just to obtain enough documentation to take out a mortgage on the property, and then skip town with the cash.

I wonder what type of mortgage you can get on the Empire State Building.

Awesome! I'm actually flying out to New York tonight after work. I know what I'll be doing tomorrow!

@CarlR: Yeah, and in this economy I bet you could get 200k, 250k easy for the Empire State.

@weakdome: Yup. Not the building, mind you, but the whole state. ;)

Of course its void, but they still succeeded didn't they?

@Orv: 250k pesos

This is a huge problem in lovely Florida. Happens all the time. The clerks just stamp the paperwork and take the money. There is no assessment as to whether the forms are genuine.

I've heard some discussion about the clerk's having to send out notices when they issue a quit claim deed so that the owner gets some notice that their house has been stolen and is about to be mortgage to the hilt. I actually monitor the status of activity on my homes via my local property appraiser web's site. I check to make sure there has been no title activity once a month.

Pretty sad.

I was kind of hoping that this story was about adverse possession. Sadly, it isn't so :-\

I was kind of hoping that this story was about adverse possession. Sadly, it isn't so :-\

Having recently turned in a 10-page memo on adverse possession, I'm kind of glad it's not!

@nursetim: I would like to buy your bridge.

that is too funneh.

@NefariousNewt: @BlondeGrlz is having a BlondeBoyz!: The government employees you so casually slam in your comment have a legal obligation to record any and all documents into the official public record. They cannot make a determination as to whether or not the Fay Wray listed on the document is an ancient actress, or an actual current day person of the same name. Try educating yourself a little about the subject before posting derogatory comments.

If only King Kong was aware of this stratagem, he wouldn't have been kicked out (err, off) for trespassing, and he and Fay would be living happily ever after. Producing lil' furry bundles of infant joy like rabbits.
Well, BIG furry bundles of...
And, like MONKEYS, not rabbits.

@Trai_Dep: Or just big ugly black rabbits with opposable thumbs and bushy eyebrows.

@44 in a Row: I just thought it would be funny if somehow, some crazy hermit living on a forgotten floor managed to somehow gain technical ownership of the thing. that would be a hoot.

@weakdome: So you get the money, and skip town, hoping you've got enough money to *afford* to skip town...

This really doesn't say anything about the stupidity of govt. employees. Those of you who think so don't understand how the system works.

Clerks in the register of deeds offices are not required to read the documents that are filed. Honestly, they shouldn't. It would cause an already moderately slow process to grind to a halt. Even the smallest of counties get hundreds of filings a day. In a large urban area it can be thousands-tens of thousands a day.

The street address to the property is not on the recorded deed. Street addresses change over time and cannot be used as a description. The legal description of the property is used. If you own a home look at your deed and read the legal description. You live in that house but if someone read that description out loud to you there is a decent chance you'd have no idea he was talking about your land. Some states use a pin system that assigns a bunch of letters/numbers to each lot. Again, a state employee is going to have no idea what the deed is referring to just by looking at a pin.

A clerk looks at recordings to make sure certain procedures have been followed. They don't, and can't make sure that the witnesses actually exist. The don't and can't make sure that the signatures on the deeds are authentic. What would you propose they do to verify these things? Start calling people? Who are they going to call? Your phone number isn't listed on your deed. The witnesses don't include that information on the deed. (Most states don't require witnesses anyway.) If a clerk rejected a document because they thought the witness shared a name with some previous notorious person a lawyer would reach through the window and beat the clerk with his own keyboard.

Those that think this is govt employee incompetence, or laziness.. It's not. This is how the system works. Someone come up with a plan that would cover all of these situations that would be less expensive to implement then the costs associated with the fraud and litigation that follows.

uh, anyone can get a deed for any property, it's public record.

@antoineawwad: Imagine the look on the President's face, reading the eviction notice posted on his front door. :)

Something like this happened to my mom once. My dad owned a house that was used as an office building. One day my mom got a phone call from a guy who said that my dad sold him the building. My mom asked him to fax over the paperwork and upon receipt she realized that this was a bunch of bull. too bad for that guy he didn't realize that my dad had died 7 years prior to the signature that was on his paperwork.

@Sinflux: I think the point is that the deed was transfered to the con.

Which brings me to my view that penalties for this sort of con are far too light. A year??? this sort of thing ruins lives on an unprecedented scale. 20 years to life...how about execution?

@Farquar: Just commenting to say I read your comment and thanks.

@MissPeacock: Just imagine what a 125%, no-down, cash-out, negative-amortization, payment-option-ARM would look like on that sucker. ;)

@Applekid: I trump your offer with a drawing of a spider.

@LiC: I read your comment because the one above it was too big. But I liked yours and you liked his, so I'm sure it was nice!

@m4ximusprim3: I violated rule #1. Keep it short.

I'm sorry..

I like how media outlets can send bombs through tsa and transfer deeds to large skyscrapers. But when I try to do it, its called terrorism!

What a topsy turvy world we live in!

@Farquar:
You are correct. The problem is most of the "cattle" do not understand this concept. It has nothing to do with the clerks being able to read the deed. A lawyer might be able to but I doubt he would be able to readily identify the property either.

the point of the article is that we need to make people aware of this newest scam to get money to be able to try and stop it from happening like it is

@Git Em SteveDave loves this guy->★: i was discussing just this subject with someone else the other day. she knew a woman who had let an acquaintance and her husband move in when they were down on her luck. she came home one day to eviction papers. the couple had come up with a bill of sale and changed the deed to their names and evicted the woman. she had no proof that there wasn't a sale and there was nothing she could do. sure, in the case of the empire state building it's pretty easy to prove the forgery is void. but in the case of someone who just signs your signature really well, how do you prove it?

"The street address to the property is not on the recorded deed."

True, but the property tax department certainly has a handy database to link deeds to street addresses for the purposes of sending out tax bills and such, so there is simply no excuse for not sending a notice to the address that is the subject of the deed filing. This sort of sanity check is very basic, and a jurisdiction not doing some level of sanity check is opening itself to charges of willful disregard of their fiduciary obligation to the citizens they serve.

hahaha... I sent in this related story a while ago.
[consumerist.com]

It's a good read if you liked this post.

@m4ximusprim3: I read your comment even though the one above it was shorter, but I liked yours and you liked his/hers and he/she liked ...

aw, skip it.

@jfischer:

lol

No county, anywhere, does this. Ever.

It's not a sanity check, its a waste of time and money. I challenge you to find a single county register of deeds that does this. You won't because such a thing does not exist.

It's a pointless endeavor. People aren't making false deeds and sticking around. They are making false deeds and immediately turning around and getting mortgages and disapearing.

Lets assume a county does this.. They mail the form out next day. Assuming the owner of the home actually lives in the home (and many times they won't, see examples) Then what? The register of deeds can't pull a recorded deed just because someone comes in and says the deed is fraudulent. It's illegal. The legality of the fraudulent deed needs to be challenged through the legal process like anything else. They can record a notification that there is some issue, but they may (and should) require some court ordered action to do so. Within a week of recordation fraud guy has already gotten his mortgage and disapeared. Screwed owner is equally screwed with the notification. It does nothing but waste resources.

It's not like this is a common problem in most areas. Most challenged deed issues have nothing to do with this sort of fraud.

@SadSam: Checking once a month seems reasonably cautious. Although, is that enough to help? They pulled this off in 90 minutes.

@Farquar: require all property sales to be videotaped?

Maybe I dont understand it all the way, but if its clear someone forged a document and took out a loan, well then, it sure isnt the homeowners fault, they didnt touch or know about a thing. Its the banks fault for not verifying the deed, or the governments fault for not having a better verification system. Sounds simple to me about who should be caring and coming up with a solution...

Now, I do understand it can be hard to prove the forged document. But why dont they just add a fingerprint requirement, or some simple id...like both people need to be present to file the paperwork, and are photographed and matched against a DMV database.

@redkamel:

??

Not following at all. What does this accomplish? Have you ever seen a real estate closing? Most of the time only the buyer is present, there are very few roundtable closings any more. The closing involves signing a bunch of papers. Awesome. How is whoever watching the video supposed to know that the people in the video are who they say they are?

Who keeps the videos? Register of Deeds have a hard enough time with space issues already. Does someone have the job at the registers office of watching the video? Yeah, that'll be efficient.

@redkamel:

98% of the time it's some law firm runner that goes to the register of deeds. Requiring the parties to go to the registers office is impractical. Not everyone lives in the same state as the property they own. So, you are going to get the fingerprint of a person not related to the transaction.

You would also appear to require the parties each be licensed to drive. That would be illegal.. and children can own land you know.

Lets not leave out property that is owned by an estate, or corporation. What photo matters, what fingerprint do we want?

Or, a peice of property owned by 2 dozen people. (trust me, its not that uncommon) You are going to have each of those people showing up at the ROD?

And all of this isn't incredibly inefficient?

All of this to say, the system really isn't broken.. People just see a few examples of bad guys being bad and want a more bloated division of govt. to prevent it.

@Farquar: It might not say anything about the clerks, but I do say that getting a mortgage on the premises is due to low underwriting standards/lazy title companies.

They usually have the APN# on the Deed of Trust, too.

@Roeroica: not DOT, i meant deed to the property.