The past year, I have been seeing more and more YouTube videos about property title fraud popping up in my YouTube feed. I initially blew them off as not pertaining to my neck of the woods here in Southern New England.
Well, apparently it is something. A video popped up this morning from vlogger Bob Sharpe on the exposure once you pay off your mortgage. In the video, he provides simple and FREE steps you can take to protect your property, regardless if you have a clear title or not.
Although our county in my state does not have a fraud alert feature, my towns land evidence office does! I was able to see all my property records since moving in here, and added all the different spellings of both mine and my husbands names that appear throughout the recorded information, along with a contact Email address. It took all of about 2 minutes.
To find out if your county has this feature, you can go to PropertyFraudAlert.com
Though that website did not yield anything for my county, when I went to our Town website and typed in "Property Fraud", it took me right to the towns office handling it. The registration was then straight-forward (identical to what was in Bob's video).
A concern I have is that I am receiving several phone calls and texts a week asking if I want to sell our property. So far, my take is - if I don't know who is calling or recognize the number in my text window, it is ignored. With the proliferation of easy AI, all I would need is to have some entity capture my voice and then generate a "Sure! Let me sell my home!" recording to use to begin some process.
On his other steps, I also have active credit monitoring. I was using TransUnion for a while to freeze my credit, but they raised their prices just way out of my comfort zone for the service. I just watch my credit report every couple of weeks through my credit union. Oh the things we gotta do these days to live...
Better to take a moment and protect what is rightly yours that you own than to let someone take it from you without pause.
Onward,
Rade
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