The Portage County Recorder’s website provides a free link to notify property owners when mortgage or deed activity affecting their property has taken place. Though such notifications may alert them to fraudulent activity, Portage County Recorder Lori Calcei said few people have taken advantage of it.
Deed fraud, aka home title theft, occurs when a person with phony documents successfully transfers ownership of a property. Armed with an ill-gotten deed, the fraudsters can sell the home, take out a mortgage on it, or even rent it for their profit. They may even have paid on the mortgage for some time.
“They just really want cash. They’re trying to get cash off the equity in your home,” Calcei said.
Until unwitting buyers or tenants show up at the door, or past-due mortgage bills appear in the mail, the homeowners have no idea anything has happened. All too often, the actual homeowners don’t know a thing about it until they — or their heirs — prepare to sell the home they thought they owned.
There are no national statistics tracking home title theft, but there have been high-profile cases nationally and regionally. For example, News 5 Cleveland late last year covered the case of a man formerly employed as a construction superintendent for a nonprofit housing organization who pleaded guilty to stealing 19 properties in Cuyahoga County.
Calcei said one case occurred in Portage County in 2021. In that instance, a family acquaintance illegally transferred a property to himself. The homeowner filed a civil case, which took a year and a half to resolve and was only over after the acquaintance signed the property back, Calcei said.
The woman’s legal fees were significant, she added. And while the case was winding through the courts, she had to keep paying on her mortgage so she didn’t lose the property she didn’t even legally own at the time.
Other examples of fraud could be a person who shares the same name as a deceased relative trying to sell the property. Or a person brings their elderly grandparent in to quit claim (transfer) a property to their children. Perhaps the plan is to avoid probate when the time comes.
“Well, there’s five kids, and guess what? It’s going to one kid. What about your other kids? Want them in on this?” said Richard Bennett, a notary with Portage County’s Bennett Land Title, which helps people navigate the mountain of paperwork involved in selling a property.
It could well happen that the grandma thought all the names were on the document, not just one, he said.
“I’m going to verify that. I don’t want somebody being cheated,” he said.
Notaries by law cannot stamp a document unless a person with a valid picture ID is physically present, he said, allowing that unscrupulous notaries and fake IDs do exist.
He said he does his best to determine the person’s competency. What day is it? Who is the president? Is the person able to knowingly sign anything, much less a sale document worth maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars?
“We take every effort to make sure that the people who are signing are the persons that they say they are, and that they are competent,” he said. “We take pictures of their photo IDs for our files, so at some point down the road, we have documentation of who signed.”
Mortgages go from the bank to the recorder’s office, Calcei said. Deeds go from whoever has prepared the document — which could be an attorney, a title company or the homeowners themselves — to the recorder’s office, which ensures everything is correct.
From Calcei’s office, deeds proceed to the county tax maps office, which checks the legal description. Next stop is the auditor’s office, which checks its records to ensure that the old owner’s information is correct and completes the actual transfer. The deeds finally arrive at the recorder’s office, which completes the transaction.
“Once it gets to the recorder’s office, we hope and feel that everybody has done their due diligence to that point,” Calcei said.
There is nothing set up at the local, state or national level to alert property owners ahead of time when activity affecting their investment is occurring. Portage County’s fraud alert link, and similar ones in surrounding counties, can only notify property owners after the fact.
“While property fraud alert does not prevent fraud from happening, it provides an early warning system for property owners to take appropriate actions should they determine possible fraudulent activity has taken place,” Calcei’s website states.
Calcei said only 2,358 people have signed up for the county’s free service. Some of them are in the system more than once, depending on if they wish to be notified by text, email or both. Noting that one person may own multiple pieces of land, the county auditor’s office lists 79,600 parcels in Portage County.
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.