AG James warns poor on deed theft
A sea of volunteers joined New York Attorney General Letitia James and elected officials in Brooklyn Saturday for a door-to-door plea for cash-strapped homeowners to get wise about deed scams that can swindle them out of their lucrative property.
Concentrating the outreach in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush and Prospect Lefferts Garden, some 300 people door-knocked homes to encourage an educated pushback at what Assemblywoman Diana Richardson called “an underground scheme of people trying to take advantage of us.”
“We know now that people who have labored for generations to achieve a piece of the American Dream are now under siege,” Democratic Rep. Yvette Clark, whose district includes much of central Brooklyn, said at a rally ahead of the outreach.
“What we are doing today is indeed fight back. Because whose homes are these? Our homes. And deed theft is an unconscionable evil striking at the heart of Brooklyn and dividing working people of one of the most important assets an American can have, a home.”
As James joined the outreach in Bedford-Stuyvesant, she vowed it was just the beginning of “a yearlong campaign of coordinated enforcement efforts,” as well as an improvement in the complaint process.
“We are reaching out to individuals offering them free assistance and putting scammers on notice that if you engage in any illegality and if you target vulnerable populations, we are coming after you,” James said, adding: “A lot of these people in central Brooklyn are equity rich and cash poor, scammers are preying upon them and we want to put an end to that.”
Volunteer and homeowner Deborah Valentin told the Daily News her uncle was a victim of deed theft, and lost his home.
“We had a lot of this stuff going on 35 years ago and here we are, it’s still happening today,” she said. “We are just trying to educate people so it won’t happen to them.”