Yes there are the quiet crooks in real estate. We’ve all been hearing the warnings about not paying in advance for real estate services offering to modify your loan, or saving your home from foreclosure, but we rarely hear about Notary Publics, the guys who authenticate your signatures on documents.

These people actually have quite a bit of power. If you need a legal document for anything it usually has to be notarized. Today I read about a real estate crook that has nothing to do with the housing crisis, whose practices started before the bubble, and will likely go on after the crisis has disipated.

A man and his wife in Rancho Cucamonga had a “domestic dispute”. The husband decided to sell their house. Somehow he managed to find a (greedy) person to handle all the escrow duties in the transaction including notarizing the signatures on the documents. Needless to say, the wife never signed any of the papers to sell the house. She didn’t find out until going through the papers during the divorce proceedings that even though she had not been a part of the sale, her name was forged all over everything.

Now, the escrow agent (Notary Public) and her ex-husband are doing jail time. Her bail is set at $450,000.00 and his is set at $850,000.00. Something I didn’t realize is that there is a Statute of Limitation on this and evidently the ex-wife and her attorney was able to pull everything together just in the nick of time, 1 day before the Statute of Limitation was up.

I’ve often wondered about how easy it would be to do this. I sold a mobilehome on an installment contract and now that I know the buyer a lot better after 2 years than I did at the beginning, I have worried about him doing that to me. I wouldn’t put anything past him. Luckily I just got a notice from the Housing and Community Development Dept. that along with not paying his payments to me, he hasn’t paid the renewal on the mobilehome since he bought it. Sure enough on the top (of the bill they sent me to pay it)is my name listed as legal owner. Whoooh! At least that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about!

DRE #00950917