Can someone steal the title to your home?

Attorney Tom Olsen: People often call our Olsen Law Group about do they need to have title fraud insurance. They worried, "Hey, Tom, is somebody going to steal my house out from under me?" We have always gotten calls about that. We continue to get calls like that because there are so many commercials out there promoting title fraud insurance. I used to tell people, "Look, to do that, you'd have to have somebody that would forge a signature, you'd have to have a crooked notary who would be willing to notarize that crooked document," and thinking, "There's no crooked notaries out there, or very few of them at least."

Now I understand is that the thieves that are doing this, they are finding a real notary. I'm sure there's public records where you can find out one way who is a legal, valid, real notary here in the state of Florida. Over the internet, they order a notary stamp and that person's name, and so that when they notarize that document, they're literally signing that notary's name, they're stamping that notary's stamp, and any third party looking at it, and including a title company or somebody doing a title search, they're looking and going, "Man, that's perfectly legit."

Attorney Alexis Richards: Yes. Absolutely.

Tom: That's how-- It doesn't require a dishonest notary, it requires a dishonest person that will buy a notary stamp over the internet. I don't know how you fix that.

Alexis: I don't know how you fix that either.

Tom: I will say this, for those [unintelligible 00:01:29] up there, "Tom, do I need to be worried about people stealing my title right now?" The answer is probably no, because if somebody was going to try and steal the title to your home, you're going to find survey stakes around your home, you're going to have people knocking on your door to do inspections, you're going to know it's going to happen, it's happening.

What people are stealing is vacant residential building lots. Vacant means there's no home on it, it's just a vacant piece of land. Residential means it's in the city somewhere. It's meant for a single family home. I'm not talking about 5 acres or 10 acres, I'm talking about a lot. That's what people are stealing. You're not usually keeping an eye on it, and often they don't do surveys or inspections on it. Before you know it, it is been done. If you own a vacant residential buildable lot that's not right down the street from you, it's in another county, another state or a distance away from you, that might be the one place where you do want to get title theft insurance.

Alexis: That sounds like that would be the situation to have it.

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