Ep. 274: “How Not to Buy a Stolen House”

“What the Hack?” is DeleteMe’s true cybercrime podcast hosted by Beau Friedlander.

Disclaimer: This transcript was auto-generated and may include minor errors.

Beau: Picture a house. Any house. Nice one, though. A great neighborhood, listed at a good price below what you think it’s worth, what anyone thinks it’s worth. You found it online. Owner happens to be out of the country and needs to move fast. So they want a deposit to hold it today. You send the deposit ’cause you want that house. It’s cheap. Oh my gosh, it’s so cheap. And that’s the last time you hear from that person selling the house.

Jman: I’m traveling, I’m overseas. Like, it’s something that if it’s a high net worth individual would be believable and you wouldn’t wanna question them.

Beau: Now think about a different house. This one’s yours. You bought it maybe years ago, and you don’t think about it too much other than, like, maybe you’re grateful for it if it points you in the right direction in life. Anyway, maybe it’s a vacation place. Maybe you’re that fortunate. Maybe you’re just not there right now. And one day, a stranger knocks on your door and says, “I live here. I bought it. I bought this house. This is my house.”

NBC Clip: How the system fails when you have checks and balances, you have lawyers on each side looking at things, how does this not get caught?

Beau: This summer, federal prosecutors charged three men with running a version of this. They allegedly picked vacant properties whose owners lived out of state, pretended to be those owners, and sold the land to someone else. In Concord, Massachusetts, a developer even started building a house on a lot the real owners never sold.

CBS Clip: In 2024, Oma and Hala Jaraki had the shock of their life, watching a house being built on the property that they owned.

Beau: So if you own a home, how do you make sure no one can sell it out from under you without you being any the wiser? And if you rent, how do you know the person you’re talking to even owns the place?

NBC Clip: Thousands are putting down deposits and signing a lease only to find out it’s a scam.

Beau: I’m Beau Friedlander, and this is “What The Hack?” The podcast that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Intro J Man, is it true or false? Real estate brokers are better looking than the general population and nicer.

Jman: We’re definitely nicer. [Music]

Beau: So J-Man Mineiro, you are a real estate broker from up north from where I am. Where are you?

Jman: Rochester, New York

Beau: Rochester, New York. What is Good in Rochester?

Jman: Garbage Plates. It’s, you ask anybody, it’s a staple. It was trademarked, so like there was one place called Nick Tahou’s that created it, and then everybody else calls it the trash plate, the rubbish plate

Beau: What is it? Is it poutine? What is it? I think of poutine.

Jman: Kinda like if you take a cheeseburger, mac salad, home fries all together with like a meat hot sauce over the top of it

Beau: Huh. That does sound like an American version of poutine almost

Jman: Yeah, it’s garbage, but it’s the best thing you’ll ever have. Setup

Beau: So, Jay man, you reached out to me because you had a very specific experience, and you walked your local NBC affiliate through it.

NBC Clip: Today’s consumer alert is about rental scams. I’ve been working with a local realtor who’s also an AI aficionado, and by using AI, he discovered scammers who are posting so many scam listing, it is a factory, a factory of fakes. On TikTok, this studio is a steal. Great location and amenities galore, so I went to check it out. So take a look at this apartment behind me. That’s the Arnold Park Apartments. It’s in a very desirable Park Avenue neighborhood. Everything is walkable. On social media, I just found a listing for a studio apartment right here at Arnold Park for $700. It’s totally fake. But this TikTok video is a scam. In reality, a studio here is 905 bucks, plus monthly fees which total 1,030 bucks a month. It’s a system of bad people that are using the same templates in different markets. Each listing looks exactly the same, and in each one, the scammer has stolen pictures of real listings. How many different accounts did you find? I think the last count was 380.

Beau: You know, in a weird way, this reminds me of romance scams. We’ve talked a lot about those on this show, about how real people’s photos get stolen, scraped, pulled, downloaded, and used to build a fake profile. A new person with real pictures. Fake person, real pictures. Anyway, stranger’s face, life is probably made up. The story is awesome. This is not true. But you wanna believe in it. So here, the person is a house. The picture’s stolen. I really wanna say purloined. I don’t know why. Anyway, same pitch, right? The pitch is built to get you to say yes before you stop and ask questions. So when you think about it, this whole thing is a lot like a catfish story, except the catfish is real estate. So is that basically what’s happening? I mean, how does this start?

Jman: Where it starts is searching for properties that would be desirable. If we’re talking about rental scams or we’re talking about vacant land, it’s something that somebody would want to buy or rent. Then the second part of that is the availability of being able to impersonate that owner.

Beau: Now, this is almost exactly what happened to our old friend and my former co-host, Adam Levin. There was an episode, oh my gosh, epic episode. It won an award. Yep, long time ago. You can listen to it somewhere back there in the archives. Adam had a beach house on the Jersey Shore. It was an amazing place. And then Superstorm Sandy knocked it down, along with all the houses on that stretch, lots of them. And there was just a vacant lot there for years.

Adam Clip: So I have a property in Mantoloking, New Jersey. It’s 100 linear feet on the ocean. It’s vacant because the house was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, and it’s been in our families for many years. It was purchased back in 1983. And after Hurricane Sandy, the property’s been vacant. I got a call from my co-owner, and we both agreed that we would list the property and that he would contact a local broker, ’cause he grew up in the area, and he called back to me and said, “The property’s already listed.”

Beau Clip: Well, first of all, Adam likes a scam the way a fat kid likes cake. And so this thing was spiritual catnip. Sorry to mix my metaphors, but he was really excited. I got a call from Adam, as I often do, and occasionally he’ll say, “Friedlander,” or he’ll say something, but this time he said, “I got scammed,” or, “I’m getting scammed”—

Adam Clip: “You’re gonna love this, Beau. You’re gonna love this one.”

Beau Clip: I think that is what he said, “You’re gonna love this.” It was like a Men’s Warehouse ad but it was for us. And so Adam calls me and says someone’s trying to steal the property in Mantoloking. I actually like to say that he was like, “You must go to New Jersey and you must do this,” but honestly, I volunteered ’cause I thought I was the second coming of Dateline, gonna go down there and catch the criminal.

Adam Clip: I was pretty excited because I realized we could actually use this for the show.

Beau Clip: And I go to the place to get a recording. Hey man, how are you? Hey. I’m good. How are you? Now, my feeling is the criminal is the realtor. That’s what I think going in. I pass by the place, and I’m like, “That can’t be the place,” but it does say the name of the realtor on the side, but it also says some other random things.

Adam Clip: It’s not really a name brand place, but they’ve been in business for over 20 years.

Beau Clip: I can’t really figure out where the driveway is ’cause it just has a U-ey kinda thing going that you can’t really get to. And so when I got in there, I thought maybe this really is just some kind of scam, and maybe the realtor’s running it. That was my thought. So the person that I go to visit is the listing agent. This is the agent who has posted this listing. If it sells, they get the lion’s share of the money. That’s who I visit. Adam has already called the guy and said, “You don’t have the right Adam Levin. I’m the right Adam Levin. And I do a show about scams, and my colleague is gonna come down there to interview you.” Hello. Hi. Hey. Beau here. So I get down there, introduce myself. I’m doing a vibe check, and he’s ready to be interviewed, and I’m ready to interview him. So start from the beginning. What happened? At this point, I’m approaching the situation the way I approached Christianity when I was 17 years old. I just don’t know. And so I was totally agnostic, but I did believe that there was a criminal. So could he be the criminal? Sure. So when I got there, I was like, “Okay, this is wrong, and I don’t know what kind of wrong.” So we’re sitting in this conference room that doubles as a supply room and probably where they do closings. 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 to see what his voice sounds like? We could. Why don’t you text him and say, “Hey, can you talk for a second?” Okay. You sure that’s fake Adam on it?

Relator: He’s saved as the real one, so now I know.

Fake Adam: Hello

Relator: Hey, Adam. It’s BLANK. How are you?

Fake Adam: I’m good. And you?

Relator: Good, good. Yeah, so I was just wondering if you had time to discuss the one offer that came in

Fake Adam: Okay. Yes. Let’s do that

Beau Clip: 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. Yeah, of course. Like how many days closing? So they can close in 30 to 45 days. That’s pretty standard. 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. I don’t have a problem then. All right, I’ll talk to you soon.

Adam Clip: We went to the FBI, we contacted the realtor, we let the realtor know that they should leave the listing up because we didn’t wanna tip off the scammer that we knew what was going on. Right. 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 pull the listing and re-list 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 officially listing the property, and lo and behold, I get a call from a second realtor who asks 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. Who are you?”

Beau Clip: And the story tracks very similar to the first one. I meet the realtor on the beach. Good. How are you? What’s your name? Beau. Yeah. Nice to meet you. So this is it, huh? So this is the lot.

Adam Clip: 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 when we were trying to convince the realtors I was the real Adam Levin.

Relator: So I googled Adam Levin and did so. And then I emailed the real Adam Levin and said, hey, I just got off the phone with my attorney. He said I need to make 100% sure that you are who you say you are because I’m not going to make the same mistake twice, right? So I googled him. I googled the books he’s wrote. I googled his podcast, your podcast. I googled just his information in general. So I made a question sheet for myself. So I made like five or six questions on this question sheet that I was going to ask him when he called me in the morning. And I was just going to ratify these questions out of him to make sure that he was. It was like who are your parents? Where did you go pre-grad? Where did you go post-grad? You wrote a book. What was the logo on the book? And it was like I made sure that I was going to be asking the right questions. And he answered them like that real quick. So I knew he was— So you mean the thumbprint with the lock in the middle of it. Yes, that one. Yes. So I wanted to make— That’s smart. Yeah, yeah. So and he— So he passed? Oh, he passed. He passed flying colors. Can I ask you a question now? Absolutely.

Beau Clip: Wait, here’s my question. Yes. Pretend for a second I’m fake Adam Levin. Okay. I go online, I figure out that his parents are. Right. I look at his book. How do you know you still don’t have fake Adam Levin?

Relator: Well, that’s why— I’m starting to stress you out. No, it’s okay. So that’s why I wanted to ask him these questions quick. Just like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang. Yeah. No Google time. No, exactly. I need him to go grab a phone and— And did he do it super fast? He did went really fast, yeah. And I said— All right. So you’re satisfied. I can tell you I’ve known him for 12 years. You have the real Adam Levin. I know he owns that property. I remember when the house got eaten up by a hurricane. It’s by Sandy. Yeah, yeah. So it’s all good.

Beau Clip: What do you think the criminal was after? Oh, he’s looking for the deposit money and running. Just the deposit. What is a typical deposit on this kind of property? Anywhere from 20% of 40 mil or four mil is— Is it that much? 20%? Yeah, that’d be pretty standard on something like this.

Relator: Now, if you’re doing a quick close, 10 days, 14 days, because a lot of the people buying these lots are paying cash, and so you could end up with maybe a 5% of four mil, and then… Still a great payday. Yeah, I mean, that’s what? 120, maybe 160 grand, if not a little more, right? Back to J

Beau: J Man, how common is it to find people listing property they don’t own?

Jman: It’s happening more and more every day, especially with technology being what it is. The data leaks that have happened with licenses, that was on one of your other episodes. But there’s so many people that have second home resort properties, they’re just absentee owners, right? And that’s kind of who they target. To your example, your friend Adam who wasn’t there present living there in the area, that’s what they look for. If the tax billing address is different than the property address, that tells you that that person doesn’t live there, and the further away the better.

Beau: How are they looking at the tax records and how would they know they don’t match the address?

Jman: Most counties, that’s public information. You can go to yourcounty.gov, search up a property address, look at the tax billing address, and see who owns it and where do they live. Fairfield Conn Story Next from there for them to sell it is that person being able to, meaning the person that says they own the property, giving a good story or being able to provide some kind of proof that they are the person, or here’s why I can’t show you right now. I’m traveling, I’m overseas. Like, it’s something that if it’s a high net worth individual would be believable and you wouldn’t wanna question them.

Beau: So there are other examples of this. Adams is remarkable because it involved a very, very significant amount of money, I think $4.5 million. But in 2023, just a stone’s throw from where I live, actually in a town abutting my town, Fairfield County, Fairfield, Connecticut, a doctor woke up one day to be told that a $1.5 million house was being built on his family’s vacant lot.

NBC Clip: This four-bedroom home under construction on Sky Top Terrace in Fairfield recently hit the market at just under a million and a half dollars. But there’s a catch, a lawsuit over who owns the property. On one side is a developer who paid $350,000 for this land back in October. But in a lawsuit, Daniel Kenigsberg, who lives on Long Island, says he’s owned the undeveloped property for decades. How the system fails, you know? When you have checks and balances, you have lawyers on each side looking at things, how does this not get caught?

Beau: A mutual friend of mine actually drove by the property, saw the house, and called up the dude who owned the property and was like, “Hey, congratulations, you’re finally developing that land. Quite a house.” And the dude was like, “Pardon me?”

Jman: It was accomplished by using a power of attorney that was allegedly forged in Johannesburg, South Africa.

NBC Clip: A fraudulent deed was given to a lawyer who had power of attorney for a Daniel Kenigsberg of South Africa. The lawsuit says the true owner has never lived in South Africa.

Jman: So somebody overseas had an ID that was good enough for somebody to accept that they were signing off to this attorney for power of attorney, and then that power of attorney is the one who did the closing for, “Yeah, I have power of attorney in all matters for the doctor.” Signs off—

Beau: Mm-hmm

Jman: property gets sold, person builds their dream home.

Beau: Doctor comes back and goes, “Thanks for the house. Later.”

Jman: Yeah. Hopefully you got title insurance. Have a good day. Massachusetts Story There’s another good one that you should probably… That was this year, July of 2026.

CBS Clip: They stole our dream. They stole our property. They took a mortgage on it. They’re building a house on it. In 2024, Oma and Hala Jaraki had the shock of their life, watching a house being built on the property that they owned. The couple learned that thieves sold their vacant land when they called Town Hall looking for their tax bill. By then, it was too late. The scammers impersonating the Jarakis sold their Concord land for much less than the million dollars it was worth, pocketing the cash. The FBI opened an investigation into the theft, and today, nearly two years later, three people are facing fraud and money laundering charges. The case involves the Jaraki’s stolen land and properties in three other states.

Beau: So Concord, Massachusetts is a pretty tony neighborhood within driving distance of Boston.

Jman: Correct. Yeah, so it’s three men, including one from Middleborough. So it wasn’t just Massachusetts, but this property was sold for half its value, and then a developer knocked it down and was building a house on it. And then they did the same thing in a couple other areas. ID Breach

Beau: This story happened before the ID scan breach. If you don’t know, the ID scan breach exposed 153 million driver’s licenses. That included some Canadian, but mostly American. And this was front and back. It gave you everything you needed. It was everything that those people needed to do whatever they were doing to verify, from traveling internationally to buying firearms, to all the stuff that really is granular and requires that stuff, which would include selling a house. So this was coming out of South Africa before the ID breach scan, but that means that there was a very good market among cyber criminals for that kind of information, like a scan of a license, right?

Jman: Correct. Yeah.

Beau: That was before the big breach. What are we looking at now?

Jman: It’s even easier because they’re more readily available, right? Hundreds of millions of IDs to choose from. I could take AI and say, “Hey, here’s the list. Cross-reference it with real estate that they might own, non-owner occupied. Those are my targets.”

Beau: And they will go through all the public records available. Have you tested this out yourself? And obviously from a research point of view, not as a person who… You don’t have access to the breach data…

Jman: I do not and will not.

Beau: No, but you can. And well, we don’t need it, J Man, because the fact of the matter is 153 million means that basically all Americans. That means there’s another 50 million that maybe never have actually used their driver’s license for anything. But the majority of people are in that breach. Almost all Americans are in that breach. So it means that you pick your property, most likely that license can be had now. What do they do next? So they find a piece of property that looks like it would be easy to sell. They know they can get the ID. Let’s just say they go to the dark web and they buy a data set where they can get that ID. Now they’ve got that ID, what’s gonna happen next?

Jman: Well, next they’re gonna look for properties like we said, and from there, find a real estate agent that will list them for them.

Beau: Now, but is that it? And then the house sells, they don’t have to show ID again and it’s just done.

Jman: Yep. Well, if it’s done remotely and depending on… You know, attorney states are gonna be a little bit more– Like in New York, we have attorneys that do closings, right? So they’re targeting title states more often because there’s not an attorney typically ever involved in the closing process. A title state means the title companies handle the real estate transaction, and in an attorney state, the attorneys do. So an attorney, I write an offer, it gets accepted, I have an attorney that approves that contract. That attorney also owns a title company. They do additional verifications to be sure that their client is who their client is

Beau: So in an attorney state, that’s when you go through that process where the attorney says, “Be right back, just have to do a title search.”

Jman: Yeah, that’s part of the process from when you go into contract and then you close.

Beau: Okay, so New York’s where you work is an attorney state. How does one do it in New York State if they do have to go through an attorney and there’s still a title search? Is it still possible for this scam to be perpetrated?

Jman: Yeah. I mean, if, again, if I’m remote and I say, “Hey, Mr. Attorney, could you do the closing for me? I’m not gonna be able to do it. I’ll give you power of attorney to handle everything. What do you need me to send? I have my license, I have additional documents, and whatever you might need in order for me to give you the rights to take care of that.” So if they have—think of anytime you do power of attorney, what do you need? It notarized and you need some ID. My other scammer buddy that’s next to me is a notary. Sign it, notarize it, send it over to the attorney. They have power of attorney. Now that attorney can do whatever I ask them to do on my behalf. I don’t even have to show up for the closing

Beau: So that’s beginning, middle, and end. So the end is just they’re gonna have power of attorney, the deal closes, and the victim finds out perhaps years later when they go to sell the property or they maybe get a tax bill for the sale.

Jman: Yeah, it could be, because sometimes depending, high net worth individuals will have multiple properties, trophy properties all over the country or the world, and they’re like, “Oh, I haven’t been to my California house in three years.” Show up and somebody’s living there happily, and they’ve been there for a while.

Beau: They’ve been there two years and they’re like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is my—”

Jman: “This is my house, buddy. It’s alarmed. I got the cameras. You’re trespassing. I’m gonna call the police.”

Beau: And that is how it happens. All right, so we’ve been talking a lot about landowners and homeowners. Coming up after the break, how this scam affects renters. C Break / Rentals If you own a home, the scam is someone selling it out from under you, or if you’re in the market for a home, being sold a home that can’t be sold to you because it doesn’t belong to the person selling it. But if you’re a renter, you think, “Well, I’m safe.” Well, you already know you’re not, ’cause we already said you’re not, but you’re really not, for real, and it’s time to listen to J Man.

Jman: In our local market, we’re having some pretty big challenges with rental scams. It’s been common for years where they scrape the photos from a current listing, then they post it somewhere for rent, typically below market, no credit checks, half of what a deposit should be, just to get people to take action and sign a lease and send deposits. And now it’s getting a little bit more advanced where people are creating fake listings. They’re creating an entire property from an AI image gallery. They just—

Beau: That doesn’t exist at all

Jman: That doesn’t exist. Yeah, I want a house that looks like it belongs in Fredonia, in the area where SUNY Fredonia would be located, and I want it to look like a rental property, not like HGTV, right? Like it’s lived in by college students, and I want to make sure that it’s the same age, same style, conforming with all the rest of the properties, and that’s how I would create all the images. And you know what? When you create the fake address, make sure it’s in line with the street names that it’s around. So if there are tree-related streets like Elm or Oak or whatever, this one’s Hickory

Beau: Now people know, and the scammers know enough to actually give these kind of prompts

Jman: Yeah, additional context just to say, “We want this.” And they obviously don’t start with, “Hey, I’m running a scam.” They start with, “I just wanna create some images. Here they are. And you know what? For this imaginary property, I want you to create an irresistible rental ad. And what would the market rent be for a property like this? I wanna rent it quickly, so what would be the absolute get it rented tomorrow price to advertise?” Because these scammers could be anywhere in the world. They don’t know what the local Rochester, New York City, Westchester, whatever market might be getting for that kind of a property. We had one here where the person was an absentee landlord—

Beau: Uh-huh.

Jman: person moves into the house. Like they rented it to them, okay? They took deposits. They finally said one person, “Yep, sure.” On moving day, the person went to the house and they’re like, “Oh, the key you gave me doesn’t work.” “Oh yeah, don’t worry. You’re gonna change the locks anyways. Send me the bill and I’ll reimburse you.” Person changed the locks. When the eventual homeowner came to this property six months later, somebody was living there, had a lease, had keys, had receipts, there illegally ’cause they signed a lease with somebody that wasn’t the owner

Beau: Now, do they have squatter’s rights when that happens?

Jman: Yeah, New York State, absolutely

Beau: So the owners actually got a whole nother problem

Jman: Absolutely. Yeah, whole ‘nother problem

Beau: Wow. Okay, give me another horror story of the rental markets.

Jman: Well, there’s a guy, after we ran the story with our local news affiliate, a guy at my gym told me same thing. His property was scammed. It’s an actual rental property of his. Somebody sent deposit, low deposit plus first month’s rent, and then was ghosted by the scammer.

Beau: Yeah, typical

Jman: My buddy went to go show the property, and this guy gets out of his car like, “Yo, where’s my money, man? Where’s my money?” Like, ready to physically assault him because he sent money. [Beat] How To Protect

Beau: All right, so let’s pretend I’m about to buy a property in Rochester ’cause I love myself a garbage plate. Is it a garbage—

Jman: You got it. You got it.

Beau: All right. I went and I tried that place. I was like, “Oh, I’m moving here.” And ’cause I’m very food motivated. So I’ve gotten up there, I found the place, my favorite place for a garbage plate, and I want a house nearby and I found one. I’m gonna buy it with you. How am I protecting myself from this going forward? Is it not such a big deal if I’m there in person? Is that the first thing I need to know?

Jman: Yeah. So if you’re there in person and you’re buying and I know you and then we can take your ID and you have multiple forms, I think the risk is less on you that you’re buying because you’re gonna get title insurance and things like that that protect you from these exact things, whether there’s an unknown error or the person didn’t have permission to sell it. That’s the purpose of title insurance.

Beau: And do I wanna put it in a trust anyway? Like a trust called like Trash Plate Incorporated

Jman: Trash Plate LLC. Yeah, I mean, you could.

Beau: ‘Cause that’s gonna be harder, that puts another step in between. But here’s the real—

Jman: or an LLC or something, yeah

Beau: Yeah, but let’s now say I am wealthy beyond anything either of us can imagine, and I just want a place in Rochester so when I want my trash plate, I can go and get it, and I only go every couple years. How do I protect that house?

Jman: Putting it in an LLC would be a good sheltering it in a way.

Beau: Okay. Shelter your—

Jman: Yeah, that would be typical for somebody, high net worth individual like that, where they’re not buying anything in their name. They’re not gonna be the one who actually shows up for anything. They’ll have a person who looks at the houses and signs it and does all that. But making sure that they can’t do the research that’s necessary to figure out who owns it, because that’s where the impersonation happens, right? And then making sure that it’s hard to find who the authorized signatures are for that LLC as well, because that would be like the second step, right? “Oh, it’s Trash Plate LLC. Oh, J Man and Beau, they’re the presidents, owners of it. Let’s get their IDs. Let’s say that we’re signing on behalf of it.”

Beau: So you can still crack it. You can still crack a trust.

Jman: But bad guys like to go to the path of least resistance. And so if you have the—

Beau: Otherwise they’d be bankers or something, right?

Jman: They’d be a CEO of a company or something, right? It’s funny. I was talking to somebody about that the other day, about how if you take somebody who’s a criminal mastermind and a CEO, they’re very much the same as far as they do research on the competition, their marketing, they know their niche.

Beau: Yeah. One’s just less patient

Jman: Right. Right.

Beau: They’re like, “What? Due process? No way, man. I got a gun.” No, but no guns… And that’s the interesting thing is this is in a way a victimless crime if money wasn’t a problem. Nobody’s getting hurt, physically. But they’re getting their feelings hurt, for sure. And they’re also losing money. Now once this thing goes down are they gonna get their money back or are they done? Is that… like the guy, like the doctor in Fairfield… but let’s talk in general terms. So what do you know about the retrievability of these properties once they’ve been stolen through fraud?

Jman: Yeah, so that’s where title insurance does come in. Title insurance protects you, ’cause typically if you’re buying a property with a mortgage, let me say, there’s one to protect the bank, and then there’s another policy to protect the homeowner.

Beau: So if you have a mortgage, chances are you already do have title insurance.

Jman: Yes, for sure. And at the very least, it protects the bank, but hopefully you also got a policy for yourself

Beau: But if your house is owned free and clear and you’re now… that’s the day you graduate. You’re like, “Okay, I paid off my house. I did the 15-year mortgage. It hurt. I hated every minute of it, but now I own this thing.” That is where you need to get busy and make sure you protect this asset, correct?

Jman: Correct. Yeah, protecting the asset, making sure that… Beyond that, somebody could impersonate you and do a cash-out refi on the property. You get a lot of equity or some kind of home equity line of credit that you didn’t know about till you go to sell

Beau: Oh, right. So they may have just taken the money that was in… So there’s a giant lien against the property

Jman: Giant lien you don’t know because they only did 50% loan to value instead of 90%, so they didn’t really need to do an appraisal where they come in the house. They do what’s called a desktop appraisal from the bank. They go, “Oh, it’s worth that. Oh, we’ll give you this, no problem.”

Beau: When we come back, one thing you can do this week to lock your property down. C Break All right. What’s one thing a listener can do this week to lock down property they own?

Jman: I think verifying, because we’ve talked about real estate agents doing it, but where it’s even more likely to happen is that person buying from another person, right? A for sale by owner. And I say, “Oh, Beau, I got this great property.” I reach out to you, I send you a Facebook message or whatever. Put it in Facebook Marketplace, and I get somebody to reach out to me and I say, “Oh yeah, I got 50 acres. It sits on the river, prime fishing. Do you like hunting? I know you like hunting because I checked out your Facebook page,” right? “Do you like hunting? And yeah, I can give it to you for this.” And then they wire the money. It’s gone.

Beau: Yeah. The for sale by owner is really another whole nother category that we haven’t talked about. And is that still a common thing outside of well-populated areas or even in populated—

Jman: No, I think even in well-populated areas, and that’s where the rental scam is so popular because it’s not a real estate agent doing it. And so they might say something like, “Oh, I have to sell this property quickly. I have some expenses.” You know, there’s always a good story, believable enough. And then when they offer it, it’s so below market, that’s really where they get them. It’s so below market that it appeals to the larceny in their soul, right? They’re like, “It’s a good deal. I gotta move fast. Honey, I’m sorry, we’re not gonna do the normal checks we would.” And “I gotta send a deposit,” whatever they need to do quickly to secure it because that person creates an… Yeah, it’s a steal, and they’re creating an enormous sense of urgency saying like, “You gotta take action now. I got somebody else that wants it. I just wanna get rid of it,” right? And the person’s like, “Okay, okay, okay.” And they get 10, 15, 20 people to send them a deposit even. Forget about closing on the property, right? Send a deposit to secure it. They send the deposit, and then they never hear from the person ever again

Beau: Yeah. And that is the most common thing. And if you think about it, if you don’t believe what J-Man just told you, I can tell you that I just recently did a clean-out of my barn where I had a couple of sinks that were left over from a renovation where I bought like three of them ’cause I wasn’t sure which one I was gonna use. And it’s not ’cause I’m loaded. I bought them off of Facebook Marketplace from other people selling sinks. So I was like, “Oh, that’s cool. Let’s go.” I bought them. They weren’t expensive. Anyway, put them in the barn, forgot about them, and then my partner was like, “If you don’t remove those sinks from the barn, I’m going to lose my mind.” And so I thought I would prefer that person not to lose their mind. I get rid of the sinks. I listed them on Facebook Marketplace. Each one was worth anywhere between 2 and $700 I would say, if I really wanted to push it with a sale. I listed them for free though, and I got rid of them in five minutes.

Jman: Yeah

Beau: And so if you make a listing where they’re like, “Here’s this, what should be $500,000 property going for $250,000 because my whatever relation has a serious problem and I need the money now,” whatever the—

Jman: “We have medical bills…” Oh, I’m so sorry. Yeah

Beau: “I’m leaving the country ’cause I don’t like it here anymore.” Whatever it is, like “I just need to cash out.” That’s the scam. And yeah, it makes perfect sense because you’d be like, “It’s a steal.” Like you said, what did you call it? A larceny level—

Jman: It appeals to the larceny in their soul. You know? They’re like, “It’s a deal. I’m not checking with anybody.” Yeah

Beau: $5 trash plate

Jman: Exact—

Beau: Sorry, it’s five—

Jman: five, and you never get the trash plate. Yeah.

Beau: The scammers in this episode didn’t need to do a lot. They just looked things up. That’s all they did. And we’re past the age of searching through boxes in a courthouse or a town hall or in a basement archive building. It’s all online. It’s easy to get to if it hasn’t already been breached, right? Which means you can look up things too. Well, I’m not gonna say you could. You could be a bad guy, but you know you’re not, and that’s not why you’re listening to the show. And as I’ve said a gazillion times for the last five years, if criminals, if that’s why you’re here, go away. Go. Just go. Shoo. So if you own a home or land, a lot of counties now offer a free service that emails you when a deed or mortgage is recorded under your name. It won’t stop a scammer. It just means you’d find out in days, not years, and that’s the difference between a phone call and a lawsuit. Not every county has this service, so if yours doesn’t, call the recorder’s office and ask what they do offer. Maybe go to the town hall meeting next week, month, whatever, and suggest that they do it. Bring some friends who think it’s a good idea. It’s not that hard to make stuff happen. And if you rent, before you send a deposit check or whatever, obviously you’re not sending a check these days, look up the address. Make sure the owner’s name matches the person you’re talking to. If it doesn’t or if they won’t let you see the place in person, just walk away. Try googling the address or reverse image search one of the photos. That’s another thing you could do. But listen, you gotta slow down. You have to slow down. You’re gonna get your answer if you take your time. All right, it’s time for the tinfoil swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. This week’s advice is super simple, and I just said it, but I’m gonna say it again. You need to slow down. Never speed into a deal. I don’t care how good the deal is. You know, if it’s too good to be true… Now, just because we talked about Adam Levin today, he probably would say, “Too good to be true? Get ready to be blue.” Would he say that? I don’t know. Adam, what do you think? All right. I do think that it is a simple one this week. If you see a deal that seems remarkable, you still need to do your homework. Even better if you can bring a lawyer into the picture to do due diligence. And finally, two things. First, buying a house, set up an LLC and don’t name the LLC the same as your name. Call it something else. Like in my case, I’d probably call it Chicken Mushroom LLC, Hope I Find a Lion’s Mane Mushroom in the Woods. And then have that entity buy the house. It gives you a layer of protection. Also, you might wanna get a trust company to help you protect the home as well. There are tools out there. You should get yourself familiar with them. If you’re running to go buy a house that’s being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than it’s worth, you should just stop yourself. Just stop. It’s not real. It really, most likely isn’t real unless it’s being sold by a bank and it’s in foreclosure. All right. If I sound like I’m lecturing you, I’m sorry, but I just don’t want you to lose your house or find yourself renting a place that you’re gonna get kicked out of because it wasn’t really available for rent in the first place, right? All right. Okay. Stay safe out there. We’ll see you next week and thanks for listening.

Learn More:

• Find out how home title fraud happens and more tips for how you can protect yourself.
• Read the AARP’s breakdown on how identity theft and property theft come together in advanced real estate scams.
• Find out how to remove your personal information from the internet