News clip: Now with an important alert, home title Fraud is one of the fastest growing white collar crimes in the country. Criminals can make millions on your house without you even knowing it.

BEAU  We talk a lot about identity theft, phishing scams, fake IRS calls. But what if I told you someone could steal your house without ever setting foot in it, without ever meeting you, without ever talking to you? It’s all over the news. 

News clip: Oh, it’s just paperwork. It’s all paperwork. Okay. If you could fill out paperwork. Yeah, it you, you can do this. This is not difficult.

BEAU:  Scammers, forge a few documents. File them with the county clerk. On paper, they now own your home. They can take out loans, sell the property, and they’re gone before anyone even notices. There’s no end to these stories.

News clip: In about a month, I borrowed $1.3 million on. Two houses. I was basically responsible for $15 million in in title fraud.

BEAU:  And the wild part, in most cases, the system believes ’em until you prove otherwise. Even if it seems super obvious. You for sure heard some of this on the news.

New clip: The surprising headline involving Grace Land, the famed home of Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley’s famous estate nearly went into foreclosure after an alleged plot to steal it. It’s the latest in the saga surrounding one of the most iconic landmarks in American culture. Elvis’s Home Graceland. The estate was almost sold out from under the Presley family in May.

BEAU:  Today we’re digging into how a crime built on paperwork can upend lives and why even Graceland wasn’t safe from it. Because the question isn’t, could this happen? It’s, how do you know it hasn’t already happened?

I’m Beau Friedlander and this is “What the Hack?” the show that asks, “In a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online?”

Intro

Beau:  So if this kind of scam can happen at a place like Graceland, what chance do the rest of us have? We called someone who spends his days protecting property owners from exactly this kind of mess.

Dell Denney, director of Business Development at the Land Trust Company. Welcome to the show.

Del Denney: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Beau: I am looking forward to this because I sometimes wake up at three in the morning and think, what if I don’t own my house anymore? And it’s, that is the business you’re in, isn’t it?

Del: It is, it is. It’s a part of the business that I’m in for sure. I.

Beau: All right, so let’s go back to basics here so that people understand what playing field we are on. What does your company do?

Del: Well, at the Land Trust Company, we do land trusts, so that’s it. We’re a one-stop shop for land trusts, and it’s probably important to really ask the question, what are land trusts? Right? Not too many people understand what land trusts are, so to put it in a very simple context, it’s another way to hold title to your property.

Del: You know, when you buy your house, usually it goes in your own name. Or maybe you might buy a investment property. You might put it in LLC. This is another way to put your, to remove your name from the title and create some anonymity and some other fun things that go along with that, but I’m sure we’ll get into that as we go on.

Beau: Yeah, no, I mean the LLC thing is funny because a lot of people do put their houses in an LLC just to protect themselves from, you know, anything liability that could be that somebody gets hurt on their property and now there’s, a veil between you and that person suing you. Maybe not be the most effective veil on earth, but it’s there.

Beau: And the problem with those LLCs is often people name them after themselves, which you just got rid of the one thing that was protecting you from the world.

Del: Not only that, but also the officers are public information. For most states, you, if you dig a little bit harder, you can see the officers and figure out what you own. So I think there’s kind of a good, better and best scenario. You know, it’s good. Own your house. It’s, it’s better to have it in an LLC and just my personal opinion, it’s best to have it in the land trust because no matter how much digging you do, you’re not going to find the, the true owner of the house without a warrant for it.

Graceland

BEAU:  So, so what was going on with Graceland? Were they trying to buy Graceland, sell Graceland?

Del: it wasn’t that they wanted to buy Graceland. They tried to steal the property, if you will. What what they did was they they claimed that they loaned Graceland some money. They used Graceland as collateral for said the loan. And they supposedly the loan was never paid back. And so that person.

Del: I put it in air quotes, had the right to foreclose on that property, but none of that truly happened. It was all forged documents. There was never a loan in place. And the, the estate, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley hired up some lawyers and they said, no, this is all forgery. Took the lady to the court and now the lady got four years in prison as a result.

News clip: Lisa Jeannie Finley told the federal judge today that she will plead guilty to a charge of male fraud related to the scheme. She previously pleaded not guilty to the two counts indictment, which also includes accounts of aggravated identity theft. 

Beau: And what role did public facing data have in, in, in the, the criminal’s ability to pull that off? 

Del: Just understanding who owned the house at that point. You know, it’s crazy that even, you know, high net worth estates still don’t have these these safety nets in place. And so that’s just what people do. They, they have the internet, they have different bots and AI that’s out there that scans the internet with just a couple clicks and they’re able to see, and they just start throwing out, you know, letters and, and, and claims. And they just do this on the masses. And finally something hits and they might get something, but they’re doing this at a mass scale, which is very, very scary.

Beau: Oh, so they’re, this is Dragnet. They’re, they’re, they’ve got, they’re just, they’re just t trawling and trolling until they find, oh, here’s one, here’s

Del: Exactly. Exactly.

Beau: this property’s worth $4 million. And that’s the person who owns it. Here I go.

Del: That’s exactly it. They’re doing this on such a mass scale and then you add AI into the mix of it as well. Find me this, find me that, you know, and AI goes out there and searches the internet. And so if we can take the information off the internet the best we can, it, it gives less ammunition to the scammers that are out there.

Beau: so this comes down to the, the age old truth in anything scam related, which is you do not have to be able to outrun, the scammer. You just need to outrun the four or five people the scammer’s chasing,

Del: More or less it’s like the bear, right? You don’t have to outrun the bear. You gotta outrun your, your fri. Yeah. That, that’s more or

Beau: which is sad, but it is like, I’m sorry, but

Del: It is what? Yeah. It is what it is. All right. Catch up, bill. Yo,

Beau: is, but it, but it, but is it, I mean, by the same token, are we starting to enter into a threat scape where it’s a Darwin, a Financial Darwin Award. To have your deed stolen.

Del: You know, I haven’t really thought about it that way, but I, I think you’re right. I, I, I really do it. It’s one of those things where there’s so many people that are out there, there’s a lot of elderly that are out there. There’s vacant land, there’s, there’s so much out there, and we’re just not keeping an ear to the ground.

And it’s going to be the case where if you, you, if you haven’t been proactive at protecting yourself, your, your risk is very high. If you think about AI and how smart AI is getting and, and what it can do, and AI agents and going out there and scanning the web, it’s making these scammers unfortunately, very, very effective in what they do. They’re becoming very, very efficient. At scamming and, you know, for good or for bad, what AI is we have to be even more diligent as homeowners to protect our property, to protect our title, to protect our personal information. So you just can’t stand idle anymore. You have to be proactive in protecting yourself.

Beau: Now, but how, how important is this for somebody who owns a. 400 or $600,000 house. It, does it matter? Is this something that’s really just for the elite out there,

Del: It matters for everybody. There’s, there’s no one that’s not at risk when it comes to owning your property. If there’s some equity, if there’s a chance to, for them to put a home equity line of credit against your property, strip it, they’re gonna take it. So even if you have a $200,000 property, and let’s say you have a hundred thousand dollars of equity in it, there, there’s still equity to, to be stripped from that.

So it doesn’t really matter who you are. It’s just if you, if you made it easy for them to tap into it, they’re gonna take it. They’re looking for low hanging fruit. They’re not digging into it. They’re not, you know, going to serve a, you know, go to the courts, ask for a warrant to see who is the beneficiary of the land trust.

They’re not going to go to that extreme. They’re gonna say, okay, perfect. Here’s John Smith. They live in Florida, but they hou they have a house or they have vacant land in Illinois. They probably haven’t seen that vacant land in, in 20 years. Let’s see what I can do with that.

BEAU: From one type of vacancy to another, what happens when title fraud hits a little closer to home? 

Ad Break

Beau: so I have I actually got a call from a friend of mine who’s a public figure whose house is in an LLC, sadly named after that person. And so you know, it doesn’t matter that the officers of the LLC are searchable and findable. 

It’s just all right there. How does a trust protect you against that? What is the legal status that makes that something that, that can’t be pierced as easily?

Del: Yeah. That, that is such a great question. And, and that’s exactly how we help. And so you think about the type of people out, public figures, doctors, psychiatrists, first responders, people that deal with the public lot and maybe they don’t necessarily want people to know where they live, right.

Could be an athlete. Right. You don’t, you, you don’t hit the, the winning soccer goal and, and then they come after you, right? We’ve seen it in the news time and time before, and so.

Beau: happened. Yeah.

Del: This is something a lot of public figures have been using for years. We’ve been around for over a hundred years doing this. And so, people have been doing this for a long time. Probably everyone else should too, since we have this little thing called the internet out there.

Transition to Adam’s story

BEAU:  You might remember this story. It’s about my friend and former co-host Adam Levin. Adam owned some property in New Jersey, a family lot really that’s been sitting vacant ever since Hurricane Sandy. Destroyed that place. Very sadly, took it away and it’s somewhere, it’s probably in a lot of places in the ocean now.

One day, a while back, he and his co-owner decided to finally list it and put it on the market for sale only to find out that it was already for sale, put on the market by somebody pretending to be Adam. At first, we didn’t know what was happening. Was it a clerical mistake, a rogue realtor, uh, or was it someone actually trying to steal Adam’s property? So I went to New Jersey. I asked the realtor to call the quote unquote Adam, who had listed the property with him.

BEAU Adam Clips: so we’re sitting in this, this, um, conference room that doubles as a supply room and, um, probably where they do closings. I, my, I’m on fire. I don’t know if I’m in the room with criminals or what. 

Can we try to get him on speakerphone? Just see what his voice sounds like. 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: We could, 

BEAU Adam Clips: um. Why don’t you text him and say, Hey, can you talk for a second?

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: Okay. 

BEAU Adam Clips:You sure? That’s fake Adam moment. 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips:I have the real, he saved as the real one. So now, so I know that’s

SCAMMER Adam Clips: Hello. 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: Hey, Adam. It’s, how are you? 

SCAMMER Adam Clips: I’m good. I And you. 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: Good, good. Um, yeah, so I was just, um, wondering if, uh, you had time to discuss the one offer that came in? 

SCAMMER Adam Clips: Okay. Yes. Let’s, let’s, let’s do that. Let’s talk. 

BEAU Adam Clips: And then we call the guy up and I’m so relieved when he answers and he sounds not like he would be friends with the realtor. You know? He just doesn’t sound like it. Sounds like a different walk of life. 

SCAMMER Adam Clips: Yeah. How many days closing? 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips:So they can close in 30 to 45 days. That’s pretty standard. 

BEAUAdam Clips: Hard to hear. He’s intentionally down talking low, talking, saying as few words as possible, knowing full well that anything he says will be recorded probably.

SCAMMER Adam Clips: Alright, no problem then. Alright. 

REALTOR 1Adam Clips: Alright. I’ll talk to you soon. 

BEAU Adam Clips: So, all’s good. And then the, that phone call ends and we’re whispering to each other. I’m telling him what to say during the, during that phone call. And, um, then his dad comes in…

 come in, come in, come in, come in, come in. We’re taping a, we’re doing taping some tone.

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: This is my broker. 

REALTOR 2 Adam Clips: Hey. So, uh, there you go. 

BEAU Adam Clips: And so now I’m like, wait a minute. That guy has a very similar tam to the other guy. The guy we were just on the phone with. Was he in the other room? And he did the phone call and then came in. Was that good? Did I do a good job? Or like, maybe this guy’s a mastermind. I’m totally paranoid and, you know, and it, and it tracks with the situation because somebody’s trying to steal a piece of property. You ev everyone in this situation like this is clue, you know, who was it? Was it the Butler and the, and you know, in the library with the candlestick, who knows?

Del: It’s scary what the public can do. It just gets crazier and crazier as the years go on.

BEAU: Del Denney again. 

Del: And so, especially with the internet, everyone’s so good at the internet. It’s a quick little Google search and you can find out a lot of information about people. And so what a Land Trust does, it takes your. Your name off the public records. And so instead of having John Smith as lives at 1 2 3 Main Street, it’ll say the Land Trust Company is the title holder, and that’s it.

BEAU: I n Adam’s case, his name was on the deed and was listed publicly, and so he had to move from prevention to mitigation.

ADAM Adam Clips: So I reach out to the FBI, I call him up and I tell him everything that’s happened. I have this property in Manalo in New Jersey. Somebody’s pretending to be me to sell it. How do we catch this guy? How do we get justice? We talk a little, but the reality is there’s really not that much for them to do ’cause the property’s still there. There was no money that was lost. The only crime was identity theft. But if there’s no financial or information tied up with the identity theft, then nothing’s really happened yet. And that’s the whole point. This is a pre-crime crime, so they, they really can’t get involved. They don’t have the resources. I mean, if there were a string of these things all over the country and properties were being sold like crazy, yes, it would be something for them to get involved with. But at this stage, at this moment, nothing’s happened yet.

ADAM Adam Clips: We contacted the realtor, we let the realtor know that they should leave the listing up because we didn’t want to tip off the scammer that we knew what was going on and the FBI came back after an initial investigation. They said, really not sure there’s a lot that we can do, but it’s up to you. You’re the property owner. So if you wanna, if you wanna pull the listing and relist it or do what, it’s your property. Do whatever you think is the right thing to do. So. We pull down the listing, we then talk about re officially listing the property. And lo and behold, I get a call from a second realtor who asked me if I’m Adam Levin. And I go, yes I am. And he said, well. Didn’t you just list your property with me? And I said, no, I did not list my property. I, who are you? 

BEAU Adam Clips: And the story tracks, it’s very similar to the first one. I meet the realtor on the beach. Good. How are you? What’s your name? Boat. Yeah. 

REALTOR 3 Adam Clips:Nice to meet you. 

BEAU Adam Clips: So this is it, huh?

REALTOR 3 Adam Clips: So this is the lot now. 

BEAU Adam Clips: So, uh, this place is pretty cool. I gotta say I’m, my first thought is, why is Adam selling this? The guy tells me about it. And then we go and we sit in his car. We call the guy. Yeah.

SCAMMER 2 Adam Clips: Please leave your message for 4 0 7. 

BEAU Adam Clips: B. Crickets.

BEAU:  This time, the criminal in question didn’t pick up why. Adam pulled the listing, the real Adam. Whoever was trying to make bank on his vacant lot. Attached Adam’s name in public records, got the heebie-jeebies and walked. Back to Adam and the first realtor to wrap this up.

ADAM Adam Clips: Now with that question, I think the biggest issue here is how do realtors, how do the people responsible for selling our properties confirm they’re actually talking to us? I mean, we ran into this problem and we were trying to convince the realtors I was the real Adam Levin, 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: so I googled Adam Levin. And you know the the, so, and then I. Emailed the real Adam Levin and said, Hey, I just got off the phone with my attorney. Um, he said, I need to, I need to make 100% sure that you are who you say you are. Right? Because I’m not gonna make the same mistake twice. Right. So, um. I Googled him, I Googled, you know, the books he’s wrote. I, I Googled, um, his podcast, your podcast. Um, I googled, um, you know, just his information in general. So I made, I made a question sheet for myself. So I made like, like five or six questions on this question sheet that I was gonna ask him when he called me in the morning. And, and, and I was just gonna rapid fire these questions out him to make sure that he was, you know, it was like, it was like, who are your par, who were your parents?

Who were, where did you go to? Where’d you go? Pre-grad? Where’d you go post-grad? You wrote a book. What was the logo on the book? And it was like, I, I made sure that I’d had, I was gonna be asking the right questions and he answered them like that, that, that really quick. So I, I knew he was, did you mean the thumbprint with the, with the lock in the middle of it? Yes. That one. Yes. So I wanted to make That’s smart. Yeah. Yeah. So any, so he passed. Oh, he passed. He passed flying colors. Absolutely. 

BEAU Adam Clips: Wait, here’s my question. 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: Yes. 

BEAU Adam Clips: Pretend for a second. I’m fake. Adam Levin. 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: Okay. 

BEAU Adam Clips: I go online, I figure out that his parents are 

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: right. 

BEAU Adam Clips: I look at his book. How do you know you still don’t have fake Adam living?

REALTOR 1 Adam Clips: Well, that’s why I sort you out. No, it’s okay. So that, that’s why I wanted to ask him these questions quick. It just like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Yeah. On Google time. No, no, exactly. I need him to go grab a phone and, and did he do super fast? He went really fast. Yeah. And I said, alright, so 

BEAU Adam Clips: you’re satisfied. As I can tell you, I’ve known him for 12 years. It’s, you have the real 11. I know he owns that property. I remember when the house got eaten up by hurricane, by Sandy. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s all.

C Break 2 

BEAU:  Adam’s, uh, story was my first taste of anything resembling deed fraud. But there are, no shortage of crimes happening out there. And, um, and it’s, and it’s a crime that is starting to happen with more frequency.

Del: there’s so many examples like that out there.

Beau: Who’s doing the crimes?

Beau: Are these locals who are like, oh, I know that lot’s been empty for six years. I’m gonna go for it.

Del: It, it’s all the above. Unfortunately. I, I hate saying that, but it could be, you know, for example, Graceland was, they were scammed from, I believe, Missouri, so it was domestic. But then there’s also, you know, an international play as well. You have China, India, Russia, the typical scammers, hackers that are out there, they’re, they’re in active threat as well.

So sure you have a domestic front. It could be, you know, someone down the road that sees it. But then there’s also an international play as well that we have to protect ourselves from. And again, going back to the internet, public records. How is India getting our information? Well, it’s through the internet that they’re using. So how can we remove our information? How can we get that data away from them through land trust, through delete me? All that helps.

Beau: What comes to mind is the Wild West nature of cyber crime right now. Is super intense. It doesn’t just include house stealing. It doesn’t just include account takeover. It doesn’t only focus in on financial accounts that someone might be able to tap into or crypto scams or romance scams.

It’s just mind blowingly wide open for exploitation and, and, and it. There is even a scam out of North Korea, it workers who are doing work in the United States and the money they make is paying for the North Korea nuclear program. And you think, do I sound, do I seem crazy? Am I like, am, am, am I a conspiracy theorist that’s well known and covered in, in major news outlets?

That’s, that’s a thing that’s happening. Now, I’m going to make a plug for everyone’s patriotic side that by removing your data from online and, and making it harder for cyber criminals to target you, you’re actually making the whole world safer. I know that sounds crazy, but I just said what I said about North Korea and I said it and I meant it, and come at me, bro. Don’t actually, ’cause it could hack me in a second, but, but the, but but, but the fact is that there are state sponsored hackers who are financing other things. They don’t care about your house. They don’t care about your, your 401k. They don’t care about your credit cards. They don’t care about anything.

They’re just after money that they need to fund the things they’re doing. And as a result, we’re all targets, right? We can actually be a part of the solution though. And, and it sounds like, I didn’t know this, but it sounds like it’s time to put my house.

A trust, and I assume I get that for a great sweetheart deal now that we’ve been on the podcast. But I, I am curious, like how affordable is this in real life? Like, if, if, if a person, like if a person has, you use the example of a $200,000 house, right? If I have a $200,000 house, I don’t wanna give you $2,000 to protect it.

Del: That that is fair enough. And I’ll say, luckily, you don’t have to do that. It, it, it, it, it’s, it’s very affordable. You know, you think about what’s at risk, you know, the average title fraud claim is $143,000, which is crazy to think about. For, for us, a property that is less than a million dollars. The, the fee is $197 per year.

Beau: A year per year.

Del: Per year. Yep. To protect that.

transition/music change – pushback

Beau: So I live in my hometown, grew up here. So we’re talking long time. I know when a house pops up on for sale on the site that I use to look at real estate, which I’m not gonna. Say the name unless you want to give me money.

So I, I go probably it’s just an app on my phone and once a week I look to see who’s selling their house. ’cause I live in a town of 9,000 and chances are I know the house, you know, it’s not that big a town. If I’m doing that every week, can somebody put my house on the market without me noticing it?

Del: If you’re a little more due diligent like that, then you’ll probably catch it. I hope you catch it.

Beau: Can I tell you something? I think I’m weird. I don’t think everyone does that.

Del: I don’t think everyone does that either. With everything that is going on, you think about the families that are out there, they’re just worried about getting food on the table for dinner at 6:00 PM They’re not actively searching the MLS. Hey, has somebody committed title fraud against me today?

Del: They’re not

Beau: Well, no, and I wanna point out to our listeners that Del Dunny is a very nice guy because I gave him a wide open shot at me to say, why? Yes, you are weird. And he didn’t take it.

But it’s, it’s, it is true that I am, I am very much an outlier, but I’m also a person as if you listen to the show, you know that I’m also a person who, when I go to get money from the bank, I unlock my debit card in the app on my phone, which is protected by biometrics and a password, and then I lock it again.

Do you do that? Probably not. Am I an outlier? A hundred percent. Why am I an outlier? Because I do a show about hacks and people are trying to take my money all the time. But the, but the fact is, you know, I might be a little more of a target than your average person. And I do check the real estate market.

Beau: As a matter of fact for that reason just to make sure, ’cause I have, I have a property and then I have an adjacent property that’s not, that could be sold and I just check if you wanna be that person, great. I can tell you that I lose sleep regularly if you don’t wanna be that person. There’s, there’s ways around it and, and I think that, you know, part of it is making sure your data’s not online and, and there’s a lot of pieces to that puzzle.

Del: I completely agree with it. And, and I do wanna mention something about buying real estate as you’re looking at real estate land trusts. Is you can purchase property through Land trust and, and it’s highly advisable too.

And the reason why that’s important, I’ll give you an example, is, is Disney. Disney is famous for this. So, as they were developing their park in, in Florida. You know, there it was around farms. There was a bunch of farms. Now what they did was, is they made their offers through the Land Trust. So it looked like, you know, 1, 2, 3, land trust is purchasing this property.

Now imagine what the farmers would do if they knew Disney was behind that. What would happen to the price of, of said land? It would go up immensely. Right now, from an investment standpoint, you, there’s a great bit of anonymity that comes from buying so real estate investors or corporations. This is also another way to really utilize land trusts.

BEAU:  If you need that level of anonymity just to make an investment work. Okay. That should tell you everything you need to know. It says a lot about how public information is, and it’s not just about Disney either. John d Rockefeller, Jr. Did something similar, but for a totally different reason. Back in the 1930s, he secretly bought up tens of thousands of acres in Wyoming under fake company names the Snake River Land Company, mostly JJY Ranch was another. Things like that. Um, all so, he could quietly donate that land.

To create Grand Teton National Park. Now, if people had known that was Rockefeller, prices would’ve shot through the roof and the government probably would never have been able to afford the park. So just like Disney, he used the privacy of land trusts to outsmart the market. A market that would’ve been like, oh, Rockefeller, this house just got more expensive.

Only in, in this case it was to protect land, right? Instead of develop it, which. That’s a very common use for land trust, but the, the lesson is kind of the same.

Privacy buys you time. The less visible you are, the harder it is for someone to take advantage of you. And that’s not just true for billion dollar corporations or philanthropists trying to make a national park happen.

It’s true for regular homeowners too. And I’ve been also preaching land trust for a long time for the same reason you do, which is just makes you harder to hit and the harder you are to hit, the more likely you won’t be. And it’s just scammers are lazy. They’re not looking to like, I don’t care if you’re Fort Knox, like. I think they’d rather get $10,000, 20 different places than focus on getting $200,000 from somebody who’s hard to hit.

Del: Well, and if I can add to that, maybe attorneys are lazy too. They

Beau: Oh, wow. Really? Tell me about

Del: I’m gonna throw it out there too, is, you know, do we live in a sue happy society? Absolutely. You know, let’s say that we get in a car accident on the way to McDonald’s later on, you know, and an attorney, were to do an asset search on you.

Okay? They’re not, they’re, it’s gonna be a quick asset search. When your property’s on a land trust, it’s gonna be tougher to find the assets. And so if you can put that veil over what you have the attorney might go onto the next case

Beau: So this is like almost like a mechanical version of an umbrella policy. You’re protecting yourself from even the idea that someone might want to go after you.

Del: Exactly. You know, if you’re high net worth or, or, or just you have just some savings and, and you don’t wanna be hit. You don’t want people, the attorneys to sue you and take you for everything you’re worth. You have a, an investment property, slip, fall, take it all, whatever it might be. If you can create more and more layers between what you own and what the public might know, the better off you’re gonna be.

Beau: Why? It sounds like you’re saying certain ambulance chaser lawyers are actually sort of almost akin to scammers. I’m kidding.

Del: I’ll let the listener uh, make their own conclusions with that one. 

Beau: But you know, it’s a dangerous world out there. And, and the more that the more agency that you can have, the better in protecting yourself.

Del: 100%.

Beau: What do you say to people who just say that this is scaremongering. You’re, you know, for 300 bucks, you’re, you’re, you are allaying people’s fears, but at the end of the day, you try to sell your house, somebody’s put a lien against it. It’s, you know, I guess my question is, doesn’t that end up costing two or $3,000 in legal fees to figure out

Del: Or more. Or more, right. You know, I, I think it’s a great question, but I’d also liken it to why do people pay insurance? Why do people have insurance on their home? You know, could it catch on fire? It could, right? It could Do they pay a little premium to protect themselves in case something that happened?

They do. Right. So there’s always this. Little bit of risk that’s involved. Now, you could not pay your insurance and that’s fine, and maybe your house doesn’t catch on fire and, and hope. Hope to God that’s the case. But what if it does? And that’s what this is about, is what if it does? What if there’s a scammer out there that goes after you?

Ending

Beau: Del Denney from the Land Trust Company, thank you so much for joining me on “What the Hack?” It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Del: Thank you so much. It was an absolute pleasure to, to chat with you and had a great time.

Tinfoil Swan

 Okay, so it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline.

This episode, if it did nothing else, it hopefully got it across to you that if you own a house, its most vulnerable point of entry may not be a lock or broken window, at least for ownership or taking the stuff from you.

It could just be publicly available paperwork. Your deed. So if the goal is to increase friction, so scammers move on to easier targets, there are two ways to go about it. The DIY route, uh, which is what I do, or the pay for play model, uh, both if you do them right, will bring peace of mind, which is sort of the goal.

If you’re already the type who checks the real estate listings every week in your town, or if you actually enjoy the challenge of a digital defense, the one who locks and unlocks their debit card, for example, that’s me. After every ATM withdrawal, you can do this. You can totally do this yourself. So what do you do?

You have to manually. With pen and paper, or maybe it’s, yeah, I think pen and paper perhaps online. Hide your name. You can petition to do that and replace it with an intermediary entity like an LLC or a trust. That’s the highest level of obscurity you’re going to be able to achieve with real estate.

But it does require a legal setup and maintenance,

Monitor the real estate market. That’s the next thing. It’s the first line of defense really. You know, just watch the listing since you’re gonna notice every new house on the market. It doesn’t even matter if there’s hundreds, if you look every day, okay, yes, I’m a little obsessive. Um, that vigilant, hands-on, totally free strategy will work for you.

It’s totally, totally will work. And then finally, you gotta remove your PII manually, you know what that is, right? Personally identifiable information. You can try to scrub that, from data broker sites. You know, people, people search sites one by one. It’s an endless, tedious task, uh, like whack-a-mole, but not as easy to win.

But you know, that said, there’s plenty of people. There’s, you know, diehards, uh, who, um, that’s something they do and they remove their stuff and they do it again, and they do it again. Because once you remove your information from online, it will pop up again over and over and over and over again.

So let’s be honest, not everyone wants to spend their down times growing through MLS listings or filling out county paperwork or doing opt-outs on people search sites. Maybe you’d rather play the drums or fly your drone in a non-creepy way, or, I don’t know, read a book.

That’s when a service makes sense, whether it’s a personal information removal service, like delete me, that makes you harder or even impossible to find online, or a land trust service that acts as the legal trustee. You can use privacy companies. There’s more than one to weave, avail. See what I did there of privacy? Kind of like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility.

The cost benefit analysis is totally up to you In an attention economy, how much is your peace of mind worth? That’s sort of the question you, you have to answer whether you do it yourself or hire a service. Privacy matters a ton. For a scammer, your visibility. Findability is the most critical asset, so fight back by becoming invisible.

That’s it for this week. See you next week. Thanks for listening.