Property fraudsters hit Floridians

Officials look for prevention as more victims lose homes

Robert Felder, 91, says he didn’t learn that the house he has owned since 1963 wasn’t in his name anymore until he tried to renew his homeowner insurance last summer.

Felder’s insurance agent called to say he couldn’t accept the insurance check because the deed had been transferred to someone else.

And just like that, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., retiree found himself in danger of being evicted from the home he has lived in for 60 years, where he raised his family and which he paid off 15 years ago, secure that he had a safe place to live out his remaining years.

Felder’s claims are the subject of a police investigation. If true, they are indicative of a cruel type of property fraud that’s as audacious as it is frighteningly easy to commit. Officials say property fraud is becoming more common as more and more fraudsters look to cash in on South Florida property values that have skyrocketed since 2020.

It works like this: Anyone can download a blank quit claim deed, add their name as the grantee, and forge the signature of the rightful deed holder as the grantor. If they find a notary public willing to ignore laws that requires witnessing the grantor signing the document, it can be notarized and recorded in the county’s public records division.

It’s that simple. If the actual owner doesn’t notice that the owner of record has changed, the fraudster can then sell or rent the house, borrow against the equity, or take out a mortgage, among other options.

Officials at the Broward County property appraiser’s

office and Palm Beach County clerk of courts office have stepped up efforts to warn homeowners, especially the elderly, of how vulnerable they are to this type of fraud, and to urge them to sign up for services that can help them avoid losing their homes.

Broward County Property Appraiser Marty Kiar’s office now has a team of five investigators who focus on property deed fraud. “It’s such a huge issue,” Kiar said. “And it’s become a very big priority for our office.”

Last summer, an investigation by Kiar’s office and the Broward County sheriff’s office led to arrests and convictions of two women who searched obituaries and used deed transfers to swindle heirs out of homes owned by deceased relatives. An investigator in Kiar’s office said the women were connected to 67 such cases across the state.

In October, a 44-year-old man was charged with creating a fictitious person to become executor of a Seabreeze Boulevard property worth more than $1 million.

In August, a Hialeah man was charged with impersonating the owner of two fiveacre parcels in Southwest Ranches and taking out a $ 516,000 mortgage on the property. The property’s actual owners learned of the fraud when they received a letter addressed to a business in their name that did not exist. Then they searched Broward County property records and discovered a document transferring the deed to a company created by the suspect.

Many of the fraudsters are out- of-state residents who look for properties owned by recently deceased elders, says Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Joe Abruzzo, whose office works with affected homeowners. The fraudsters gamble that they have time to make money off the properties before heirs notice what they’ve done, he said.

While local officials say they have no power to stop fraudulent recordings, Broward, Palm Beach and other Florida counties have in recent years established property fraud alert services that immediately notify homeowners by email of any document recording that transfers ownership of their home.

Hundreds of thousands of homeowners have signed up for such services. But what might not be well-known is that heirs or designees of elderly homeowners such as Felder, who aren’t comfortable using email or the internet, can sign up on their elders’ behalf.

Broward County’s “Owner Alert” service requires users to submit an official property identification number, plus a state driver’s license number or identification card number to verify ownership of the property.

An heir or designee of the owner who wants to receive alerts must contact the office to identify themselves and their relationship to the property owner, Kiar said.

Palm Beach County’s “Property Fraud Alert” service, however, does not require proof of ownership or verification of the user’s relationship to the homeowner. Users can simply type in the owner’s name, the property address, its parcel number, and the legal description of the property to have alerts sent to the user’s email address.

Because Palm Beach County’s clerk of courts administers that county’s service, it differs from Broward’s service by sending alerts whenever any document is recorded involving the property, including liens, mortgages, and notices of commencement by contractors.

In Broward County, 178,351 subscribers have signed up for a service called “Owner Alert” that’s available on Kiar’s website. Since the service was established in spring 2021, 23,723 owner alerts have been sent, though a majority of those conveyed reports of legitimate property transfers, Kiar said.

Nearly 40,000 Palm Beach users have registered for that county’s service since 2015, and more than 300,000 alerts have gone out, said Joseph Abruzzo, Palm Beach County’s Clerk of Courts.

Miami- Dade County’s clerk of court does not yet offer an email alert service but mails a letter to property owners whenever a Quit Claim Deed is recorded for the property.

Kiar and Abruzzo say there’s no way to determine how many of the alerts in their counties resulted from fraudulent deed recordings, but Mila Schwartzreich, general counsel and director of administration for the Broward property appraiser’s office, says the number of property fraud cases assigned to her office’s investigative division has been increasing every week.

The five-member investigative team working out of Kiar’s office includes two full-time investigators recently hired by the office, plus a Broward County Sheriff ’s Office detective and a Fort Lauderdale police officer who helps develop criminal cases against property fraud suspects.

Since February, the unit

(TNS/South Florida Sun Sentinel/ Carline Jean) Robert Felder, 91, sits in front of his Fort Lauderdale home where police are investigating his claim that someone filed a fraudulent deed transfer and forged his signature in an effort to steal and sell the home he’s lived in for 61 years.