Home Loans and Mortgages – Beware of Deed Theft ScamWritten by Charles Essmeier
The average home in United States has a value of $206,000, a record amount. Real estate prices have been rising throughout country during last five years, and homeowners have seen value of their property skyrocket. In California alone, equity in private homes has increased by more than one trillion dollars in last five years alone. Many homeowners do not even realize that their home may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they know. Unfortunately for them, a new breed of thieves is well aware of value of home equity, and a scam known as “deed theft” has allowed them to steal homes from thousands of people.
Deed theft is simple in principle. The perpetrators of deed theft post flyers around town offering “foreclosure help.” They seek homeowners with mortgages who may be experiencing some temporary financial setback that threatens them with foreclosure. It’s not uncommon for people who have been living in their homes for years to have a sudden financial emergency that prevents them from making their house payments. Perhaps a job loss or illness is to blame. The economic downturn of last five years has left a lot of people struggling to pay their bills, and these are people that deed thieves seek. Their flyers promise to help those in danger of having their homes taken through foreclosure. The thieves meet with homeowners and ask to have title to home transferred to them. In exchange, “rescuer” will promise to pay
| | Home Loans and Mortgages – Beware of New “Mortgage Elimination” ScamWritten by Charles Essmeier
The booming real estate market has allowed many Americans to become “equity rich.” They may not have a lot of cash on hand, but they might have equity in their homes worth several hundred thousand dollars or more. Unfortunately, this increase in home wealth has spawned an equally booming business in equity theft, as more and more thieves find increasingly clever ways to con homeowners out of their equity, their homes, or both. One clever new scam involves companies that promise to completely “eliminate” a homeowner’s mortgage. For a fee of a few thousand dollars, these companies claim that a homeowner can have a free and clear title to their home without paying off remaining debt. How does this scam work?
This scam is a bit more complicated than other scams that often use simple forgery of identity theft. In this “mortgage elimination” scam, homeowner places his home in a trust with mortgage elimination company as trustee. The trustee files a long, tedious, frivolous, letter of complaint with mortgage company, giving them a mere ten days to respond.
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