In the end, that’s what I think. And the irony here is that the banning of TikTok would actually end up doing very little in protecting the safety and security of our personal information online. And my guest today is a first-hand 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 cyber security. And you can actually access precisely that kind of expertise and security by clicking on the link below and signing up with Home Title Lock.

If you’re 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 TurleyTalks 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’re chatting a little bit before the interview here. Obviously, you have a unique insight. Everyone’s going to find out if they don’t know as we chat.

But what are your thoughts on this potential ban of TikTok? Is banning TikTok 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. You know, it’s all over the place. You don’t even need to download Tora and go on the dark web. You know, the dark web. You can just go to there are plenty of Russian websites that are run where you can just purchase people.

They call them them dumps. It’s a dump of information. You can purchase, you know, 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. It’s a full spectrum of what that person is. Everything, name, date of birth, social security number, 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 irrelevant whether or not TikTok TikTok gets banned.

I like what you say, because I mean, no, I think it’s valid. I mean, maybe TikTok 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, 10 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, Matthew, on on how you’ve become so knowledgeable on cybersecurity issues.

So I was a mortgage broker back in the early 2000s. And I began to commit fraud, you know, to, you know, just to make a little extra money. And it very quickly got out of hand. I 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 fifty five million dollars in it was it was fifty five million dollars in fraud. And the bulk of that fraud was related to title theft, home title theft.

And the problem is, 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 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. 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. And 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, they’re all title theft. Right. Right. Well, I was I was stunned when you guys showed me how easy it is to to access my deed online on a scale from one to ten, with ten being the hardest. How how easy is it to hack anyone’s title in their home? Their their deed online then and then use that to get a bank loan against the deed to the house.

I was 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. Then 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 what I was so excited to chat with because this goes so 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, no, no. This is 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 now I can go into Starbucks with my laptop.

I can pull up the deed to your house. I can create a deed, 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. And their Wi-Fi is 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. Despite all of the 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. Right. I don’t really mind if the IRS shows up 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 this is a this is a crime that has this this this this time lingering to it. It’s it’s it’s almost like the astronomy. You know, I’m seeing stars in the light that they were given off two thousand years ago, whatever it was two billion years ago.

When the crime hits you as a homeowner, it’s it only hits you months after it was actually committed. That’s kind of the evil genius, as it were, of this thing. Absolutely. It’s you’re you’re notified. Many of my victims were notified when the when the lenders 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. All the people working on it. 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. Yes, they are with most cybersecurity issues. It’s 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 our home titles are are basically on kind of these, you know, clunky, junky county websites that are real easy to hack.

Is that 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. I don’t you don’t need. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t need to be a hacker. I can pull up. Right. 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 the synthetic identity that has the same name as you.

And I could just start borrowing money on the house that you’ve owned for 10 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 that does doesn’t the county alert the homeowner or your credit. Let’s say your credit. I’ll bet you have a push notifications on your credit card every time that 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 as possible.

There’s very few counties. 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 it’s it’s almost not worth noting because nobody’s signing up for this that service.

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, 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 twenty four seven 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, it’s interesting about your your 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 ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars 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. And 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’s it’s it really is a nightmare situation. It can’t. And this is yeah. This is why it’s so important to catch the crime as it happens immediately as opposed to months and months down the road. Correct. Yeah. Well, that it for that’s that’s a fraudster’s worst nightmare is being caught in the middle. Luckily, if if I if I were to do something like this and I got away home title lock and fix the situation for you.

But if I was caught in the middle of the of it, if you were notified and then able to contact law enforcement, law enforcement were able to apprehend me. Yeah, that’s the worst case scenario. First 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. Right. Before you even realize there’s a problem. Right. Right. Yeah, that’s what makes us so unique. So fascinating. So what do you think is I mean, what’s when all set in 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 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 they’ve done everything they can do to make this as safe as as possible to work with them and fix these problems as soon as they occur. Right. It really is the best situation. And like I said, you have people have this on their credit card. They have the identity that they protect everything except the largest purchase purchase most Americans lives.

Right. Right. This is your biggest asset for most middle class Americans is their home. Right. And they have no idea how vulnerable they are. Well, you really need a company like Home Title Lock. Yeah. Yeah. I was 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 in the like gang. This is 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 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 Home Title Lock come in. So make sure to click on that link below. Sign up with them today and you’ll get 30 days completely free. Just use the promo code Turley Talks completely free. Click on the link below 30 days. Use promo code Turley Talks. Again, 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 Turley Talks. Get your first 30 days for free. Matt, well, thank you for resolving TikTok for me. I mean, I was getting a lot of questions like 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 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. [tr:trw].

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