The person who owns this home reached out to five on your side saying a woman he doesn’t know claims she owns it and tried to file a deed to prove it. WRO’s Keely Arthur shares how this could happen to you. The only way for Adams to prove he’s the rightful owner is by paying a lawyer $8,000 to prove it in civil court. He’s frustrated that he has to take on that financial burden and he wants to warn you that if this could happen to him, it could happen to you. Dr. Craig Adams signed off on the construction of every square foot of his Raleigh home.

When a stranger tried to claim it as their own, he was confused. Something like this really makes you feel violated, vulnerable. Adams says a woman filed a fraudulent warranty deed with the Wake County Register of Deeds claiming she owned the property. Adams says she didn’t have to show any ID or proof that she owned the home to file that document. There’s no inquiry as to who owns the property. If there had been just that one simple check, my name would have popped up. The Register of Deeds says they’re taking the situation seriously, but they are, quote, not required to verify the legal validity of a deed when it is presented for registration.

So the Register of Deeds, they’re not attorneys. Attorney Cara Dudek Petrie Gibbons says deed fraud like this does happen most commonly on properties that are in LLCs, trusts or that are paid off. She told five on your side there’s not really any way to prevent this and there’s a lengthy legal process to correct it. You’re a victim of fraud and then you’re doing all this work and having to spend money to clean up something that you did nothing to have happen to you. Adams is now pursuing charges, but even if there is a conviction, he still has to go through the civil process, which he’s been told will cost him around $8,000.

This woman went down mid August, filed this claim and has created a nightmare. What a mess. Well, Adams believes the woman who filed the deed was trying to get into his home, squat there and then use the fraudulent deed to keep from being evicted. Pretty crafty. You can contact your local Register of Deeds to set up a fraud alert so you get a warning anytime something is filed with your name on it. What a bizarre story, Keely. Hey gang, it’s me, Dr. Steve. And I know with everything going on in the news right now, the election just around the corner, why bother to bring up a small North Carolina crime? Well, what you’ll see is that this North Carolina crime is actually an indicator of a much larger problem and exactly why November is so important for the safety and security, the assets and legacies of so many of you.

The hardworking patriots of this country. Don Megham is not your typical mother of three. She allegedly falsified documents in an attempt to take over Raleigh dentist Craig Adams $4 million home. Now, Megham was arrested on a felony charge of attempting to obtain property by false pretense. A judge set Megham’s bond at $150,000, citing the value of the home and the nature of the alleged crimes. Now, what they found was that in August, a deed with Megham’s name on it was filed with the Wake County Register of Deeds, claiming she was the owner of Adams $4 million home.

Most puzzling of all, Megham allegedly did not have to provide any proof of ownership before having the deed recorded. Something that Adams, the dentist, obviously says needs to change. So why should any of this matter? We all know there’s fraud in this country, particularly white collar fraud. We all know we need to be protected. So why am I bringing this all to your attention? Well, home title fraud isn’t a new phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of dollars of home equity stolen from hardworking Americans by criminals every single year via these fraud schemes. You heard that right.

Hundreds of millions of dollars home equity stolen every single year. So a good question might be why and how is this happening? Why haven’t authorities stepped in to stop this crime? And there is an answer to that. And it’s actually rather sickening. Elites and bureaucrats benefit from this problem being perpetuated. So instead of protecting citizens and patriots from literal themes, governments run by elite bureaucrats are allowing these crimes to happen so they can monetarily benefit from the prosecution of the criminals. And then, of course, they don’t use that money to make the lives and properties of we the people safer.

No, they hoard those things for their own gain, for their own affluence, for their own wealth. This is literally a crime that happens all the time. And it seems those in power have little incentive to stop it. Joining me today is investigative reporter and friend John Summer. John has been investigating home title fraud for quite some time now, and I’m pleased to have him here with us. And I’ll just say this, if that dentist in Raleigh and millions of others knew about John’s work and his solution to this problem with home title lock, they would never have been in the mess that they’ve been in in the first place.

So, John, good to see you. Thanks for joining us today. Great to be with you, Dr. Steve. Well, it’s awesome having you. Yeah, yeah. So what is what’s going on here? I mean, you’re on the front lines of this. Give us a sense of what’s happening here with home title fraud and are the elites really benefiting from this? Well, certainly the attorneys are benefiting from it at the expense of the poor homeowner. And as you laid it out, Steve, it’s it’s a crime that is has been growing leaps and bounds for the last 25 years or so.

Originally, when the FBI first identified this, they called it house stealing. And it was really just kind of on the horizon at that particular point. But over the last 20 years or so, it’s really become a problem because it’s so easy to do. And this woman that you mentioned with the case in Raleigh, Megan, who was able to manage to transfer the title of this multi-million dollar beautiful home into her name, it’s not an unusual case. It’s so easy to do. The question is, what did Megan want to do with it? You know, I hadn’t heard the end of that.

But generally, when when people are able to steal someone’s deed or someone’s title of their home or property, it doesn’t have to be a building. It can be undeveloped land, which we’ve had several cases here in my area of central California. I’ve been working with the DA’s office and their chief investigator on this because they’re just starting to find out it’s a problem. Open land, undeveloped land. It doesn’t make any difference, Steve, whether it’s a home or whether it’s your mother’s house or a cabin in the woods or an Airbnb apartment building that you own or something that you rent out or your own home.

What the thief wants is not the property. What they want is what it’s worth. And then they’re able to take that and they can convert it into a sale, for instance, selling it without the owner even knowing it. And I imagine that’s probably what this woman in Raleigh wanted to do. Or they can leverage the value of the home, the equity in the home, take out loans on that, multiple loans on it. And the owner would never know until one day, you know, there’s a knock on their door or they get a letter in the mail saying you haven’t paid your monthly, you know.

Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s it’s incredible. And Steve, the thing is, law enforcement officials haven’t really gotten hold on this. You probably heard there’s a state next door to you. I think you’re in Pennsylvania. Right. It’s it’s called New York. And and they have an attorney general there. You may have heard of her. And she prosecutes crimes, what she calls crimes. In this case, she just actually identified title theft or home title theft as a crime, which is wonderful because now we we have recognized the fact that this exists. Yeah. Welcome to the party.

Right. Yeah. A little a little a day late and a dollar short, as always. But the thing is, Steve, you can call something to crime, but you still have to be able to prosecute it. Right. And they can’t find these people. They’re gone. They can be on the other side of the world. There are syndicates, crime syndicates that do this. They go online. They can use AI now, artificial intelligence. They can create fake documents. They can be somebody that they’re not. And they can steal your home if they’re in Nigeria or North Korea. It doesn’t make any difference.

They have offshore bank accounts. They transfer the money. The money is gone. And you go, what the heck happened? Because it’s too late. But there are ways to prevent it. And if you’d like to talk about it, I’ve done a lot of investigating on this. And I found one solution that I think is something that’s of value to everybody. Yes. Before we get in, because I’m really the day late, a dollar short. Why is the government so have been so late in this? This is what I’m not understanding. I mean, this is this is obviously it’s a it’s a as you’re pointing out, a rampant theft.

It’s international. All of us with our deeds online are our potential victims of it. What why isn’t this like top priority for the government? It hasn’t been their problem. I mean, when when you think of crime involving your home, for instance, you think of somebody that comes in, they burglarize it, you know, and they steal your jewelry or they steal whatever is of value in there. And they’re gone. Now we’ve got a crime. Maybe you have a ring camera on your home. OK, so we can actually see who entered the home and who left it.

So now we’ve got, you know, some evidence that we can follow up to try to find the criminal. OK. And law enforcement departments understand this. This is traditional crime. Home title theft or deed theft is nontraditional. And they really haven’t quite wrapped their minds around it. As I said, Steve, I’m working with the local district’s attorney’s office. Only in the last year and a half or two years have they really found that this has become a problem. Seventy two. And it’s probably a lot more because it’s been a couple of weeks since I talked to them.

Seventy two homes in the last year and pieces of property that have come in with with it being identified as a problem. Someone’s tried to steal it. Local real estate agents are all talking about it right now because they’re getting duped. I had this one young woman who is new in the real estate business. Cool lady. And she said she got a call one day from somebody who said, I’ve got this piece of property. Property, mind you. Not a home. Land out here in California is as valuable as for sure. And the person says, hey, you know, I got this piece of property.

Would you sell it for me? And she goes, well, yeah, that that’s easy. And she said, let’s get together and we’ll talk about it and we’ll figure out how we want to handle the sale. And so it’s no, you don’t need to get together with me. Just just do it. Well, she became suspicious as she should have. And then we went to our local DA’s office. And the first first thing she did is she tried to contact the owner, the guy that supposedly was the one that called her. She ultimately was able to do what real estate agents could do.

She went back through records and so on, found the owner. In fact, he’s in another state. And she said, hey, you know, you call me the other day to sell this property. I just have a couple of questions. And he goes, I didn’t call you to someone. That wasn’t me. It’s not for sale. So then she went to the DA’s office and said, hey, I got a problem here. And they started to investigate it. Now they’ve got one guy that is dedicated to cyber guy, by the way. Dedicated just to this crime alone. And this Steve has just happened in the last year.

And it’s just amazing. And it’s just duplicated all across the country. You know, law enforcement officials are just starting to find out, hey, Houston, we’ve got a problem here and we’ve got to do something about it. But there are, you know, but it’s really, really hard for them to do something about it. Yeah, they’re playing catch up. They’re playing catch up. They’re way ahead of them. The criminals are way ahead of them. So obviously the answer isn’t relying on or waiting for our political institutions or government institutions to do anything about this. So that’s the case based on your research.

What recourse do we have in the face of such rampant and very serious threat of fraud? Well, there are services that you can contract that will monitor your title. And there are a number of them out there. And I’ve looked at all of them. And I found one in particular. It’s a company called Home Title Lock. And they have a website, hometidallock.com. And I would just say, hey, you know, go on their website and check it out. In fact, I believe, Steve, that the company has a code that your viewers and listeners can use.

They do. Yeah. If they use the code TurleyTalks, they’ll actually get a Home Title Scan for free, which is really a lovely benefit. But do you mind walking through a little bit of how this kind of protection, it’s a good kind of surveillance, as I understand it, right? It’s surveillance from the good guys. It’s because all of our titles are online now and not the most secure position either, given that they’re hosted by local governments most of the time on shoestring budgets. And anybody can access them, right? So can you give us a little bit of a sense of how Home Title Lock creates a shield around that? Sure.

So as you mentioned, Steve, you know, anybody can access, I mean, just go online and you can look up any piece of property. Every property has a number that identifies it and so on. And the documents can be created very easily to be able to transfer a title into your name or an entity’s name or anything else. And the fact of the matter is that most of the local county clerk’s offices, if all the paperwork looks proper on it and it’s notarized and you can get a notary stamp off of Amazon, then their job is done.

I mean, they can’t ask if this is really correct or not. They just, if it looks good, it’s transferred. So what Home Title Lock, the company does, it’s a monitoring service, kind of like, you know, you have a credit card and you’ll get a call from the credit card company and they’ll say, we have some unusual charges, Steve, did you make these? And you can say yes or you can say no. And if he didn’t, then maybe they’ll reverse the charges on you and then that’s the end of it. But with Home Title Lock, they monitor your title 24-7 constantly.

They have this incredible software that they’ve developed to be able to do that. And then if something should look fishy, there’s some monkey business going on with it, then they will alert you immediately. Hey, you know, are you doing something with your property or is this something else that you don’t know that’s going on? Generally, that kind of stops it. But sometimes these things can happen so fast, Steve, that the thief can get away with your title before you’ve even had a chance to, you know, to tackle the problem. And in that case, Home Title Lock has an incredible crew that is able to work with you to reclaim your title, to put it back in your name, to cure the deed and avoid the incredible expense and anguish of having to go through the whole court system, which is what you were talking about earlier.

You know, there’s profit there with the attorneys and so we’re able to represent you. And I think this fella in Raleigh, I mean, he was going to have to spend over $8,000 just to be able to get the title of his home back rightfully into his name. So Home Title Lock works with you to prevent having to go through the system and they can actually handle this rather quickly because this is what they do, you know. Yeah, I love it. It’s so holistic. So they’ve got the 24-7 watch over your deed. And then if something were to happen, they’ve got a whole team that’s got your back to help you through it.

Yeah, they notify you first. Hey, do we have a problem here? Yes, yes. All right, let’s get on it and take care of it before it becomes a real problem. Because once you lose your home, I mean, for most people, Steve, you know, it’s I mean, the equity in there, especially here in California, where the house prices are crazy. The equity is your is your life savings. Yeah, maybe an IRA or something, but that’s it. Yeah, yeah, I was just reading. I think it’s what we just surpassed $20 trillion in home equity just in America alone.

I mean, it’s just it’s an enormous market to to to ping off of if you are in the in in something for the racket there. But yeah, gang, look, the bottom line is is that our homes are already under attack that that’s the key, what John is saying here. And the current system is not going to come to save you. We all need to protect what matters to our legacy before it’s too late. So this is what I want you to do. I want you to scan the QR code on the screen or you just can go to the link in the description below.

Use promo code Turley talks and the great guys over there at home title lock. They’re going to give you a free protection scan. If I recall, it’s $100 value. Absolutely free, which is really cool. So gang, just get the peace of mind and knowing you’ve taken the first step in defending your home from these predators because gang, if you don’t obviously no one else will. So remember, use promo code Turley talks, get your protection scan. Absolutely free. It’s it’s something that you definitely owe to yourself and your loved ones. Thanks again, John, for being with us.

Thanks for your investigative research and and thank you for helping us. Hopefully nip this in the bud because it is a very, very concerning situation. It is in the home title lock. If for nothing else, it’ll give you the peace of mind that you know that you’re you’re protected and your viewers and listeners deserve nothing less. I have it myself. So in my family. So listen, great speaking with you today and thanks so much. Yeah, it’s an honor, John. Thank you so much. [tr:trw].

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