Florida leaders are warning of an increase in property fraud

Property fraud is a growing problem in Florida and across the United States.

One Tampa couple is still fighting to get their home back. This is almost a year after someone else took their home away, changed the deed without their permission or knowledge. Dreama and Larry Bilby weren’t living in the house at the time because it was being renovated. It was a house they’d lived in for 40 years.

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The Bilbys had set up surveillance cameras because they were going to be away. And earlier this year, Dreama Bilby noticed a man and a woman snooping around the house on their surveillance videos. The couple kept coming back to the house. Larry Bilby decided to register for property fraud alerts through the Hillsborough County Clerk of Courts. And Dreama said she heard from the clerk’s office a few days later.

“I got a message that our deed had been changed. ‘Well, lo and behold, we hurried down to the clerk of the court, which is the first thing you should do, is check with them, and then you need to file a criminal report. So, we did all of those things because, yes, our deed had been changed. Someone had put our home and their name under an LLC,”’ she said.

Hillsborough County Clerk of Courts Cindy Stuart said Michelle Cherry and her husband Victor Rodriguez, who came to Tampa in January from Miami, used a quitclaim deed to steal the Bilby’s property in February. They were caught on video submitting the paperwork at the clerk's office.

Most people probably don’t know about this type of transaction. It’s a quick way to move a piece of property and the ownership of it from one person to another, for example, in the case of a divorce or a property transfer from a elderly parent to a child.

“It is a single page document that requires very little information on it. It has the property address, the current owner, and basically, statements that you are intending to move this property from the current name to whatever names are listed on the bottom. It only requires two names, two addresses and two signatures,” Stuart said.

Assistant State Attorney Michael Lennon is chief of the Economic Crimes Unit in Hillsborough County. He said the law doesn’t provide a way to prevent such crimes.

“It’s too easy for someone to forge a quitclaim deed, take it to the clerk's office, and there's no real safeguards in place other than the notification system. But that's kind of after the fact that that will get someone arrested, they'll get someone charged, because now they're on camera doing it. But that doesn't prevent the forged deed from actually being filed,” Lennon said.

By law, every county in Florida must provide a free service to alert people if their deeds have been changed, whether for houses, businesses or vacant property.

And in nearly every county in Florida, you can do that through the clerk of courts website.

However, such alerts don’t prevent the fraud from happening. They only let you know it has happened, within about 24 hours. Otherwise, you might not know until you get or don’t get your tax notice from the county, which usually comes in January or November.

There’s a two-year pilot program in Lee County to try to close the loophole in state law that makes it easy for this to happen.

"In a perfect world, I think the clerk's office should have the authority to reject documents on their face. The problem with that is, how do you know a document's fake? It's really difficult, actually, when you dive into the details about whether you can factually know that a piece of paper is fraudulent," Lee County Clerk of Courts Kevin Karnes said.

He said the pilot program is built on getting government-issued IDs tied to land records.

“So, if someone in the community said, we think this is a fraudulent land transaction, law enforcement now not only has the suspected false document, they also have the government issued IDs of all parties within that transaction,” Karnes said.

He said the legislature has given his office the task of assembling a legislative report that will make recommendations to them on this pilot program. And it will be up to lawmakers to determine the next steps.

Dreama Bilby says if you’ve been a victim of property fraud, you may want to pursue criminal charges. That is what she and her husband Larry did. In fact, the day they found out about their deed being changed, they went to the legal library in the clerk’s office and Larry placed a $500,000 lien on their own property.

That prevented the thieves from reselling their house. But the visits to their house by Cherry and Rodriguez didn’t stop.

“Our neighbor of 40 years saw these people around our home and asked them what they were doing there. And he happens to be a bailiff actually, in our Tampa court system. And they said they own the home. They bought it from Larry. And he said, I know that not to be true. You need to leave. So, as we're sharing this information, we realize that we are really up against something here,” she said.

Dreama Bilby said someone she knows who also had their deed changed through fraud is fighting back through a civil process and it has cost them dearly.

“So they are way out of pocket in trying to get this under control, and they've been doing it for years, and it still isn't under control for them either,” she said.

Hillsborough Assistant State Attorney Michael Lennon said Cherry and Rodriguez will be prosecuted for identity theft. He said it carries a heavy penalty. And they are being charged with committing this kind of fraud by changing the deeds on three separate houses in Hillsborough County this year, using forged documents and forged signatures.

“Whenever there's a property involved in an identity theft and using someone else's name, forging someone else's signature, qualifies as identity theft under Florida law. And whenever that identity theft is committed, and there's $100,000 in property involved, you’re looking at a 10-year minimum mandatory and a maximum penalty of up to 30 years in state prison for that offense,” Lennon said.

He said he’d like to see lawmakers amend the law to require the property owner to be present when quitclaim deeds are used at a clerk’s office. And he had more ideas about what he’d like to see changed.

“And if the grantor can't be present for a quick, clean deed transfer, then the transaction has to occur at a licensed title agency, because there are going to be more safeguards in place at a licensed title agency, and there's also going to be typically title insurance that's involved as well, and it gives a lot more legitimacy to the transaction,” he said.

Lennon said if you are going to be away from your property for any length of time, you should sign up for the property fraud alerts.

“Make sure you keep your property kept nicely. If it looks abandoned, if it's got boards on the windows, if the grass is overgrown, if there's mail that's piling up, those are going to be homes that are more targeted because the scammers think that those are easy properties to steal,” he said.

And then they’ll try to flip the house by selling it to an unsuspecting buyer.

It's not clear whether the surge in empty homes following hurricanes Helene and Milton may cause a rise in property fraud. But Hillsborough Clerk Cindy Stuart thinks it may.

"So I suspect there will be an uptick in this. You know, as with any natural disaster, there's always fraud and crime that comes with that," she said.

You can sign up for property fraud alerts in Florida through this website.

If the link doesn’t work, go straight to the clerk of courts website in the county where your property is. The only exception is for Broward County, where fraud alerts are issued through the property appraiser’s office.

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