A forged deed conveys nothing, so you will probably win. Winning is the expensive part, and that cost is the actual theft. The two defenses that work cost nothing.
A criminal can put a document on your property record for the price of a tank of gas. Nobody at the courthouse will stop them, and no federal agency is counting how often it happens. Into that gap grew a protection industry selling a service the FTC called a ploy and two city attorneys subpoenaed. Deed fraud, seller impersonation and equity stripping also get reported as one crime, and they have different victims, different mechanics and different remedies, so advice written as though one control covers all three will fail somebody. This assessment separates the part of the fear that survives contact with evidence from the part that does not.
Eight of the assessment's findings, each labeled in the report by the evidence standing behind it.
Every article that sizes home title theft reaches for the FBI's real estate loss total, $275,110,419 across 12,368 complaints in 2025. Appendix B of the same report defines that category as loss of funds from a real estate investment, or fraud involving rental or timeshare property. Deeds, titles, recording and conveyance appear nowhere in it.
No federal agency, recorder association or state office located in this research publishes an audited count of fraudulent instruments recorded against residential property. The two national surveys that come closest ask professionals what they encountered rather than counting filings. Anyone quoting a national deed fraud figure is quoting the FBI number or making it up.
Title companies rate vacant land a common target at 85 percent and primary residences at 12 percent. NAR asked a different population and got 62 percent vacant land against 12 percent owner-occupied. Nobody lives there, no lender watches the title, no mortgage complicates a payoff, and a cash closing raises no eyebrows.
Among title companies seeing seller impersonation attempts, 84 percent flag the absence of a mortgage, third on their list. The equity is not the attraction. The attraction is that no second party with money at risk is left to check who you are. When the loan is discharged, the owner becomes the only entity monitoring the asset, and most owners check their deed roughly never.
In Faison v. Lewis, New York's highest court held that a forged deed is void from the outset and not protected by a statute of limitations. You keep the house. What you lose is the money and the years spent proving it. Recording the forgery costs $25 flat in every Georgia county. Clearing it costs a lawsuit that no public source has ever priced.
The FTC's August 2024 alert states that title lock insurance is not insurance, prevents no transfer, and tells you only after one is recorded, while many areas run free notification programs doing the same thing. Texas opened a deceptive trade practices investigation into Home Title Lock in January 2023, and San Francisco and San Diego subpoenaed the company that April.
Consumer Reports ran seven paid removal services against thirteen people-search sites for four months with 32 volunteers. Removing listings manually cleared 70 percent within a week. The best paid service reached 68 percent after four months, and two finished at 6 and 4 percent. The cheapest service tested was among the two most effective.
Since 1 January 2025, House Bill 1292 has barred walk-in self-filing of Georgia real estate documents. A self-filer must file electronically and upload a government photo ID that is verified before the filing proceeds. Identity verification at the point of filing is the one control that attacks the economics of this crime rather than the time it takes to discover it.
Read the full 24-page assessment for the rest, including the state-by-state map of notification, title freeze and expedited quiet title mechanisms, why the enhanced owner's title policy is the one paid product in this category worth buying, and four scenarios to 2028 with the public signals that would confirm each.
This isn't a vendor summary. Every sentence is labeled by what stands behind it: verified fact, vendor claim, third-party estimate, my assessment, hypothesis, or scenario. Sources are numbered and clickable. Forward-looking sections use scenarios with observable tripwires, not forecasts. It's the same method behind every market assessment I write.
Twenty-four pages, built from public sources with no client brief and no interviews. Read it in the browser or take the PDF.
Each report here answers a real question, directed and researched against public sources and evaluated against a stated assumption, then delivered as Word and PDF. If you're weighing a platform, sizing a category, or defending a number to a board, tell me the decision behind it and I'll tell you honestly whether a report is the right tool.
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