A few weeks ago, longtime realtor Chris Anderson got a text from a person who wanted her help.
“They wanted to talk to me about selling their land,” she said. “They said that they lived out of area and they would need to have handholding through the process. And so I said, ‘Sure, let me help you with that.’”
The impersonator gave her the correct property owner’s name, his wife’s name and their address in Wyoming. They even had a notary and made a fake email account using the property owner’s name for her to send documents to.
“It’s a sophisticated scammer,” she said.
Anderson didn’t suspect anything until she noticed the property worth more than $2 million was already listed for sale and the scammer was trying to let it go for $150,000.
“That’s normally another trigger that either there’s a financial doom coming to them or it’s a scam,” she said. “What we did is at the very end, I said, ‘This is great. I’m going to be sending you the DocuSign documents, but before I can, I need to have a copy. Just text me a copy of your driver’s license or a passport, so I can make sure that you truly are the owner of the property.’ They hung right up.”
County Assessor Jordan Marks said this is happening with tens of thousands of other properties across our county — most commonly in rural areas, like Julian, Ramona and Alpine.
“A lot of common cases are the neighbors down the block that saw that you passed,” he said. “Your kids haven’t taken over the property yet. They live out of state. They don’t know the property’s paid off.”
He said there are still crooked notaries, but new technology makes it easier than ever for scammers to get one.
“We’re seeing with AI and the evolution of technology, people and their personalities are being falsified,” Marks said.
To fight this, the county launched a free service called “Owner Alert.” It monitors titles 24/7 and email alerts owners if anybody transfers a title to their property.
“We want to make sure that those folks that want to commit title theft know that this county is not the place that they want to do business because we’re going to catch them,” he said.
Marks projects that by the end of this year, about 40,000 San Diegans will have signed up for Owner Alert.
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