Westend61/Getty Images
In March 2023, William Gordon received a letter in the mail from his title company congratulating him on the $200,000 sale of his Tucson, Arizona, property. The catch: He'd never listed it for sale.
Gordon noticed almost immediately that the congratulatory letter was off.
"I noticed the last four digits of the socialsecurity number were not mine and the address was wrong — the mail shouldn't have even gotten to me," Gordon told Business Insider in 2023.
Gordon, 66, bought the undeveloped, 3 1/3-acre property in 1999 for $76,500, Pima County property records show. He's been paying regular mortgage payments on the land and had around $9,000 left to pay on the loan when he got the letter telling him it had sold, he said.
Gordon, who most recently worked in technology risk at a major financial-services firm, is one of many property owners who have experienced real-estate-related fraud. In 2023, 9,521 people in the US reported losing more than $145 million from real-estate scams, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center.
Home title theft — a crime where someone steals a homeowner's identity to take ownership of a property — leaves property owners, like Gordon, without many options for quick reconciliation. And it's been happening with greater regularity in recent years. In Gordon's case, he was pulled in many directions over countless phone calls and had a hard time getting a straight answer on how to move forward.
"The county said, all you have to do is just undo this," he said. "But nobody seemed to know how to undo this."
Gordon noticed a number of red flags in the congratulatory letter he received from the title company that he said they should have noticed, too.
"There were several really odd things that had been ignored," he said. "The notary that they used was five-and-a-half hours away in an entirely different county from where the documents were signed."
Gordon lives in Phoenix, but the warranty deed recorded by the county — which was reviewed by BI — had "Arizona" and "Pima" crossed out and replaced by "Texas" and "Bexar," a county almost 900 miles from Tucson.
"I was not in Texas," Gordon said. "I could prove that I was in Arizona at the time that the paperwork was signed by a notary in Texas."
It's unclear who impersonated Gordon, but the notary stamp gave the name of "Penny Davis" of Texas.
William Gordon
Gordon spoke with Title Security Agency, the Arizona company that handled Gordon's title work when he purchased the property in 1999. (Note: The current entity came under new ownership in 2020 after being acquired by First American Financial.) Gordon said the company quickly realized someone was impersonating him. It directed him to his county recorder, whose job it is to record and index documents for the area.
The Pima Recorder's Office told Gordonthat it records documents but doesn't verify them, he said, and sent him back to the title company.
Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly told BI in 2023 that she wasn't sure why the title company referred Gordon to her, saying the recorder's office is essentially a library.
"We rely on title companies, on notaries — which is why they are required to have insurance — because it is ultimately up to those companies to have the safeguards to ensure that they're dealing with the correct property," she said.
Notaries and real-estate agents usually confirm the identity of the parties involved in a transaction while title companies confirm ownership of the land, but according to Gordon, none of that happened before his land was sold. He was miffed that a document as crucial as a deed would not have a rigorous verification process for identification, he said. First American Financial did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Business Insider.
"I can't go and cash a check in a bank for $20 without two forms of identification," Gordon said. "And you're doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial transactions, and you have zero processes or feel any responsibility to confirm identities?"
Some real-estate agents in Arizona said they've seen a rise in fraud in recent years — especially for vacant land.
"In the last three or four months we've seen a huge uptick, and it caught everybody by surprise," Eric Gibbs, the designated broker for Realty ONE Group Integrity, said to BI about title fraud in 2023. "I'm not saying it never happened before, but not like this."
Gibbs didn't represent the buyer in Gordon's case, but his brokerage did. He told BI that in this instance, the seller was found out to be fraudulent soon after the deal closed.
Cases like these, Gibbs said, are getting harder to sniff out. He told BI he spoke with a broker who had four fraudulent incidents in one day. But Gibbs has instituted measures within his own firm — like asking for copies of photo IDs and having Zoom meetings with clients — to minimize fraud in vacant-land sales.
Michael Van/Getty Images
Jeff Murtaugh — the CEO and designated broker for Realty Executives Arizona Territory, which brokered the sale of Gordon's property — says he's adopted a new procedure after seeing what Gordon went through. He now sends a letter to the property that must be signed by the seller and returned, in order to confirm their identity.
But, he said, the question of who the responsibility to catch fraud falls to is still hazy.
"The question is, who's got the liability," Murtaugh told BI in 2023. "Is it the title company? Is it the agents? I don't think anybody knows that yet."
Gordon hired a legal team — that he has since dismissed — in an attempt to get his land back.
It cost about $9,000, he said.
He ultimately got his property back, but it wasn't easy.
After the buyers were refunded their $200,000 from Old Republic Title Insurance, the title insurance company they used in the transaction, they signed a quitclaim deed which relinquished the right to ownership of Gordon's property and granted the county the ability to transfer the title back into Gordon's name.
It sounds easy enough, but Gordon said dealing with the title insurance company was tricky.
Gordon said Old Republic Title Insurance paid off his remaining mortgage balance and property taxes during the sales process and demanded he pay them back $11,000.
Gordon ended up taking money out of his retirement account to pay back Old Republic, he added.
Old Republic, which also goes by the abbreviation ORNTIC, could not be reached for comment, however, the company did email a statement to Gordon's former legal team, which was first reported by News 4 Tucson in July 2023:
"ORNTIC has no contractual relationship with Mr. Gordon and declines to issue a title policy to Mr. Gordon. ORNTIC furthermore owes no duty of care to Mr. Gordon as ORNTIC was neither the escrow nor the title company handling this transaction. I understand that you allege that the escrow company failed to exercise due diligence, but that company is completely unrelated to ORNTIC."
Gordon was disturbed that this happened to him, but, he said, more upset with how little the title companies did to help him.
"They could have filed some paperwork with the county, reversed it, and all of this would've been fine," he said. "But instead they made my life a living nightmare and then said, 'Well it's not our responsibility.'"
While Gordon did have to have to spend additional money to get his land back, it could've been worse.
Daniel Kenigsberg, a doctor in Fairfield, Connecticut, discovered that a developer built a house on land he owned in 2022. The developer said it had bought the land from a fraudster claiming to own it. Kenigsberg sued the developer for $2 million in 2023 and, according to CT Insider, received a settlement for an undisclosed amount.
Vacant-land transactions, like Gordon's and Kenigsberg's cases, are often easier targets because no one lives on or monitors the land every day.
Still, there are other ways that scammers can take advantage of homebuyers.
Regina Smith, a Tennessee-based director working in supply chain at a Fortune 100 company, sent $60,000 in down-payment funds to a scammer instead of her title company after receiving a fraudulent email with wire-transfer instructions. She was able to get the money back, but she lost out on the house she was trying to buy.
"The first thing I felt was complete and utter despair," Smith told BI in March. "I just could not believe this was happening to me. I sat on the floor and I cried for maybe 45 minutes."
Laurie and Rich Ramelow had a similar situation with reverse outcomes: They got the house but lost the money.
The Ramelows were moving from California to Texas to be closer to their daughter. While completing the steps to buy their Texas house, they wired $63,000 to someone they thought was their escrow officer.
It turned out to be an imposter.
Not wanting the deal to fall through, the couple dug into their retirement funds to ensure they wouldn't lose the house — and they didn't.
But, so far, they have yet to recover their stolen funds.
"It was pretty devastating," Rich said. "We had to liquidate some funds from IRAs from retirement. It did have to cost penalties and that sort of thing, but we didn't want it to drastically fall through so we could still move on."
