Hey, gang, it’s me, Doctor Steve. You know, one of the questions that I’ve been getting a lot lately is what do I think about the latest attempts by members of Congress to ban TikTok? And, you know, I just got to say, you would think that with the current epidemic of cancel culture and censorship that we’re all facing today, I don’t know. In many respects, the answer would be kind of obvious, wouldn’t it? When all is said and done, your security, my secure, our cybersecurity is being used by members of Congress as a pretext to dictate what we can and cannot say.

In the end, that’s what I think. And the irony here is that the banning of tick tock would actually end up doing very little in protecting the safety and security of our personal information online. And my guest today is a firsthand expert on what’s involved precisely, in breaching that security. I’m joined once again by Matthew Cox, who has. He was once called the most prolific home title thief in America, and he was on the FBI’s most wanted list for years.

But today is now an amazing expert in cybersecurity. And you can actually access precisely that kind of expertise and security by clicking on the link below and signing up with home title lockdown. If you’re a regular to this channel, you know them well. Home title lock is a 24/7 monitoring service that keeps your home title secure. They’re offering this service completely free for 30 days if you use promo code turlitalks at the link in the description below.

So, Matthew, welcome back. Great to see you again, my friend. Great to see you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, you know, I’m really interested in your perspective on this. We were chatting a little bit before the. The interview here. Obviously, you have unique insight. Everyone’s going to find out if they. If they don’t know as we chat. But what are your thoughts on this potential ban of TikTok? Is.

Is. Is banning tick tock going to solve the vulnerability issues for our personal information online? You know, no. I mean, maybe it might help, but I personally think that our information is already online. You know, you can find everybody’s Social Security number, their dates of birth, places of birth, their full names. It’s all over the place. You don’t even need to download Torah and go on the dark web.

The dark web you can just go to. There are plenty of russian websites that are run where you can just purchase people’s. They call them dumps. It’s a dump of information. You can purchase, you know, it hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands if you want, depending on what you want to spend. And you can cherry pick whatever type of information you want and you’re going to get what’s called a full a.

It’s a full spectrum of what that person is. Everything, name, date of birth, Social Security number, where they’re. Where they live. I mean, it just depends on what you want to spend. But your information is out there. It’s just. It’s available. Right, right. So it’s. It’s irrelevant whether or not tic tac tick tock gets banned. I like what you say because, I mean, no, I think it’s valid.

I mean, maybe tick tock has. There’s a. There’s a unique usage that they have that’s specific to them that we may want to get rid of, but. But in the end, it’s not going to solve your vulnerability issues online. Would have been great if they thought about this, you know, ten or 20 years ago. It’s a little bit late. It’s a little late. Yeah. A little too. Little too late.

That’s right. Well, why don’t you give everyone a little bit of your backstory story, Matthew, on how you’ve become so knowledgeable on cybersecurity issues. So I was a mortgage broker back in the early two thousands and I began to commit fraud just to make a little extra money, and it very quickly got out of hand. Ultimately, I was. I’ve been arrested and indicted by the FBI several times, the Secret Service.

I was a career fraudster at one point. I went on the run for three years. Ultimately, I stole an estimated $55 million in. It was. It was $55 million in fraud. And the bulk of that fraud was related to title theft, home title theft. The problem is it’s. It would be great if it was a simple answer, but there are so many varying types of title fraud that it’s hard to.

It’s. It’s more than just going and transferring someone’s deed to their house and reselling their house out from underneath them. And many times I’ve. I’ve actually borrowed money while in the name of a homeowner, while they’re living in their house. Right, right. And borrowed money, opened up bank accounts, had the money, transferred the bank accounts, pulled the money out. And then. Then when the FBI shows up looking for this person, you know, they’re still in the house.

They think that the homeowner did it. That’s just one example. Right, right. Yeah. Eventually I was. I’m sorry. Eventually, I was caught. I did. I went to federal prison. I did 13 years for bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, a number of crimes, including identity theft, you know, title flooded. They’re all tied. All title theft. Right, right. Well, I was. I was stunned when you guys showed me how easy it is to access my deed online.

On a scale from one to ten, with ten being the hardest, how easy is it to hack anyone’s title in their home, their deed online then. And then use that to get a bank loan against the deed to the house? I would. One to ten when I was doing it. You needed a skill set of, you know, eight to ten. Now three, two or three. It’s easier than credit card fraud.

It would be more difficult for me to get your information and get a credit card in your name than it would be for me to transfer the deed to your house into someone else’s name and sell it easier, way easier and easier now than ever. Yeah. That’s why I was so excited to chat with you, because this goes so beyond TikTok. This is what drives me crazy, is a lot of people just like, oh, just, we get rid of TikTok, everything is fun.

No, no, no. This goes way. This is the Internet itself. It’s the nature of life itself. Give us a sense of what is it that makes a home title, in particular, so susceptible to theft in today’s cyber centered world? Yeah. So I’ll give it now more so than when I was active. When I was active, you had to go downtown, go into public records, go through the files.

You had to pull the files, print these things out, go home, type it up, you know, that sort of thing. Now I can go into Starbucks with my laptop, I can pull up the deed to your house, I can create a duplicate deed for your house, and I can transfer it out of your name. And let’s assume you have if. Let’s say you say, oh, well, I have three mortgages on my house, so there’s no equity.

I’ll satisfy those mortgages. I’ll type out a one page document and put a notary stamp on it. Everybody’s got. Everybody has Photoshop. I can make it look like the loans on your house were satisfied, and I now own your house free and clear. And I’m doing all this from Starbucks, by the way. Yeah. While you’re sipping a latte right on their wi fi. It’s not going to come back to me.

I can open a couple bank accounts online, I can schedule closings online. I can have, have those closings in most states online. I don’t even have to go to a title company or attorney. I can do it online and I can have that money wire transferred to the bank accounts and then remove the bank accounts. Either you sending it to crypto, you want to buy diamonds, gold. There’s tons of ways to launder money.

Right. And despite all of the rule, all the rules that are in place, there are many, many ways to get around those rules. And none of those affect me anyway, because I’m doing all of this in a stolen identity. Right. Right. I don’t really mind if the IR’s shows up in, in three weeks to ask me some questions because I’m not here anymore. Right. Right. That’s what I found so fascinating with this is this.

This is a, this is a crime that has this, this, this time lingering to it. It’s almost like the astronomy, you know, I’m seeing stars in the light that they were given off 2000 years ago. Whatever it was 2 billion years ago. When the crime hits you as a homeowner, it only hits you months after it was actually committed. That’s kind of the evil genius, as it were, of this thing.

Absolutely. You were notified. Many of my victims were notified when the, when the lender started foreclosing or they show up and someone’s trying to move into their rental property. Wow. And they’re saying, that’s my property. And the guy’s like, no, it’s not. I rented it from some, this guy named, you know, Michael Shannon or whatever paperwork and. All right, I close or I close. I have a lease.

I have. Whatever the case may be, it’s too late and I’m gone. I don’t even. I don’t. The criminal does not have to deal with the consequences. And the homeowner, the actual victims are ill equipped to handle it. Right, right. Law enforcement is even. Is even ill equipped to handle it. Right. Yeah. As they are with most cybersecurity issues. Just, it’s just, it’s, it’s two, three, four years ahead of the.

Ahead of their skill sets, as it were. I remember talking to you last time. You were, you were, you mentioned that our home titles are basically on kind of these clunky junkie county websites that are real easy to hack. Is that still the case? Well, it’s not that they’re easy to hack, it’s that they’re available. You can pull it up. You don’t need to be. Oh, there you go.

Yeah, you don’t need to be a hacker. I could pull up the deed to your house, including the mortgage that’s attached to it, any liens on your house, and I can satisfy all of those. And then I can just transfer the deed to your house out of your name into the name of anybody. It could be any stolen identity I want. Or I could, I could even create a, what’s called a synthetic identity that has the same name as you, and I could just start borrowing money on the house that you’ve owned for ten years.

But is. So if that were, if you were doing that to, like, my Google account, Google would, would notify me immediately. Whoa, somebody’s changing your password. Somebody does. Doesn’t the county alert the homeowner or your credit? Let’s say your credit. How about you have a push notifications on your credit card every time it says, boom, you just bought Starbucks. Right. The. There are a few counties that will notify you if you’ve signed up.

Nobody even knows this is possible. There’s very few. There’s counties out there. Yeah, it’s several years ahead. There’s 30, there’s like 3500 counties who signs up for this? If you bought your house 20 years ago or 15 years ago, you don’t even, this service didn’t even exist really in the last few years because it’s been such a problem. They’ve recently started saying, hey, if you sign up for this service, we’ll notify you if there’s a change in your title.

And that’s great, but that doesn’t help a regular homeowner because they don’t know what to do from there. No, right, right. And so there’s that. And that’s, honestly, that’s, it’s, it’s almost not worth noting because nobody’s signing up for this, that service, but that. Yeah, please go ahead. No, I was just going to say it’s, at this point, it’s. It’s useless without having an advocate to help you through the process.

Yeah, well, that, no, that’s awesome. That’s a great segue because that goes right into home title lock because. Right. That’s. Because that’s what you guys offer, this holistic, 24/7 literal surveillance of the home title, but then also the support system that you need if someone does begin to mess around with it. Correct? Is that the idea? Yeah, absolutely. You know what’s interesting about your credit card? If your credit card is stolen, there are laws in place that force the banks to immediately give you the money back, but that’s not.

So with your with your home title, you know, so what happens if you sign up for home title lock? They notify you, you know, hi, by the way, did you just transfer the deed to your house, or did you borrow a third or fourth mortgage on your house? And of course you say, no, I did not. Well, they’ll immediately, they’ll contact you. They’ll go through public records. They’ll, they’ll contact, they’ll help you with contacting law enforcement.

They will help you get an attorney. They will help you unravel the, the nightmare situation that you’re now in. Yeah. And without them, then you, you’re going to need 1015, $20,000 to go find yourself a real estate attorney who’s then going to have to go through the process and who knows how long that might take. On top of that, what if, like I said in my case, I’ve done this in homeowners names.

Right. In those cases, most of those lenders did not believe that the homeowner had not been involved, and so they did not want to work with the attorney. They wanted to try and foreclose on the property. So now you’re having a turn. You have to pay for an attorney to fight foreclosures on lenders that are saying you’re involved in a fraud that you have no idea about. It really is a nightmare situation.

It can’t. And this is. Yeah. This is why it’s so important to, to catch the crime as it happens immediately, as opposed to months and months down the road, correct. Yeah. Well, that, for, that’s, that’s a fraudster’s worst nightmare is being caught in the middle. Now, luckily, if, if I, if I were to do something like this and I got away, home title lock can fix the situation for you.

But if I was caught in the middle of it, if you were notified and then able to contact law enforcement. Law enforcement, were they able to apprehend me? Yeah. That’s the worst case scenario for a person like me. My people like me bank on you not being notified for six, for 60 days, 90 days, 120 days down the line. I want to be gone two or three months before you even realize there’s a problem.

Right. Right. That’s what makes us so unique. It’s so fascinating. So what do you think is, I mean, what’s, when all said and down, what’s the best way for homeowners to protect themselves from the headache and the heartache of having their home titles stolen? I mean, I, there are other companies, but I really do think that home title lock is, is the premier company in this industry. You know, they’re the ones that started doing it.

They have state of the art equipment. They have, they have all of the, they have people that are prepared, they have the lawyers, they have law enforcement. They’ve done everything they can do to make this as safe as possible, to work with them and fix these problems as soon as they occur. It really is the best situation. And like I said, you have people have this on their credit card, they have identities that they protect everything except the largest person purchase.

Most Americans lives, right, like, this is your biggest asset for most middle class Americans is their home. And they have no idea how vulnerable they are. Wow, you really need a company like home title lock. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I was shocked when I found out when I first started working with home title lock how easy it was to access the deed to my home. And not just access it, but change it and the like.

Gang, this is a, this is why I was so excited to have Matt come on. Because, I mean, we all have access to one another online and if you think the offline world’s insane, say inside, inside DC, it’s possibly even worse online. So I just want all of us to be safe and secure. And that’s where Matt and hometitle lock come in. So make sure to click on that link below.

Sign up with them today and you’re getting 30 days completely free. Just use the promo code turlitalks completely free. Click on the link below. 30 days. Use promo code Turley talks gang don’t. Don’t wait for the worst to happen, only to regret you didn’t do something when you could have. Right? Do it right now. Do what I’ve done. Do what countless patriots have done. Click on the link below right now.

Secure your home today with home title lock. Use promo code turlitalks. Get your 1st 30 days for free. Matt. Well, thank you for resolving TikTok for me. I mean, I was getting a lot of questions out going, you know, I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound right for me. I just appreciate your perspective so much just on how, how vulnerable we are online in terms of our information and how this goes way beyond just any particular social media platform.

So thanks again for coming on back and chatting with us. Thank you for having me. .

See more of Dr. Steve Turley on their Public Channel and the MPN Dr. Steve Turley channel.