How a complete stranger tried to steal my dead father’s home

My father’s will was a printed email with the subject line: “MY WILL!!! PLEASE PRINT!!!!” in bold at the top of the page he’d gotten notarized without witnesses. Unsurprisingly, the email, which instructed that his condo be left to me, his only child, wasn’t a valid legal document. I looked up “what qualifies as a legal will” before he died and took the Google results at face value. Apparently my father’s disdain for bureaucracy was something I’d inherited.

Even as we both prepared for his passing over years of health decline, one thing we didn’t do was seek the advice of an attorney. Neither of us could have anticipated that this decision would cost me thousands of dollars, six months of stress and an incomprehensible weight to my grief when a man I never met ended up stealing my father’s house.

After my father passed, I flew from L.A. to Palm Beach, Florida, heartbroken and exhausted, and began the lengthy, expensive process of preparing his condo for resale. It was in dire disrepair. I put almost $40,000 on two credit cards, assuming I would recoup it once the house was sold. I had to spend another $5,000 on a probate attorney to prove the house was mine to sell, and then wait four months for the paperwork to be processed, accruing credit card interest on the renovation costs all the while.

The day I expected to get a call from my attorney to tell me that the name on the deed had been changed to my own, she instead called me with a name and asked me if I knew him.

While I’d been working on the condo, the man, whose name was completely unknown to me, submitted a deed to the county clerk indicating that my father sold him the property for $10, two weeks before he died.

According to the state, my attorney said, the condo belonged to him. I remember sitting in my car, aghast, repeating, “That’s not real.”

“Unfortunately,” she replied, “you need a real estate lawyer, even if it isn’t. Would you like a referral?”

She e-mailed the phony deed, and there, in what was not my father’s signature, was my father’s name. There were also two “witnesses” who bore the same last name we did. I’d never met these people before, and when I looked one of them up, the person had actually predeceased my dad. Additionally, my father, who had two PhDs and was very proud of the title “Dr.,” would have been enraged by this forgery for obvious reasons, but also he would have never signed his name without Dr. in front.

I’d seen headlines about homes worth millions being stolen with AI deeds. Even Graceland was the target of a similar scam. But I had never heard of a grieving loved one having a modest property stolen out from under them.

I was shocked to learn my situation is not unique. There are no national figures on deed theft and deed fraud, but the crimes are well known to law enforcement, and numerous agencies have issued warnings that these crimes are increasing. Nationally, examples are easy to find. Two people were charged under new, stiffer laws in New York in August for allegedly stealing a woman’s house while she was in hospice. A 92-year-old woman lost her Dallas property to deed fraud in 2023, which she discovered only after her daughter noticed a for sale sign on the lot.

The attorney I consulted, Michael Merino, was very familiar with these frauds. Scammers will look at public records to identify certain types of properties, he explained. My father’s obit made him a target for the crime — an easily laundered, backdated deed that would enable a scammer not to steal the home, per se, but rather to take out a loan against the mortgage.

Merino said this scam had become so common, the state of Florida had changed the law in 2023 so people could self-file what is called an “attempt to quiet title,” or any legal arbitration that resolves disputes over real estate, without an attorney. The weight of the renovation and probate costs suddenly felt far heavier as the timeline of selling the condo seemed impossible to anticipate. With the help of my mother (who was long divorced from my father), I elected to attempt to resolve it myself.

Even as a tech savvy, self-employed and educated individual, I found the process nearly impossible, often throwing my hands up in despair. Dead-end mazes of phone lines led to employees who all told me that they couldn’t help and that the only person who could get a phony deed removed from the public record was a judge. Worse, I would need the man to be a notified defendant for a judge to see me.

My mother went to the county clerk with examples of my father’s signature from his passport to driver’s licenses, only for them to tell us that their job was to record the records, not verify their legitimacy.

I filed a police report, but as it is a civil crime, no investigation followed. The police officer made note of my complaint and never called me again.

I hired a private investigator to try to find the man, whose common name offered no thread to follow. The PI told me for $85 an hour she’d sit outside the phony address listed on the deed, but I didn’t see the point.

After almost four months of dead ends, my brilliant best friend had the idea to pursue the notary on the deed, as opposed to the man himself. I called the police and begged for help. An officer agreed to contact the notary, who testified that this was not even her stamp and that she had never signed this document, in effect proving it was a fraud.

Thrilled, I scheduled my hearing, assuming this proof made the case an easy one to close. Again, I was wrong. The judge told me I had not done my due diligence to find the man. Between tears, I pleaded, “But I have proof this document isn’t even real!” The judge told me it didn’t matter. The man could countersue for never having been contacted, which would nullify the judgment. “But he would be effectively admitting to fraud!” I croaked. The judge dismissed me.

He did offer one piece of advice: Take out a notice in the paper. You have to post notices weekly, which costs $3.18 per line for about 23 lines. The defendant has four weeks to respond. As my last expense related to the debacle, I did it immediately. Four weeks went by, and we never heard from him, though I doubt he was checking the legal notice section of the local paper. I scheduled another hearing, and this time, the judge ordered the deed be expunged.

While I was in this situation, I felt like I was drowning. The confusing legal system and my grief bled into every facet of my life, but in one 15-minute Zoom hearing, it was over. Ironically, in the same week, I accepted an offer on the condo and sold it, more than 10 months after my father’s death. What felt like a maze I would never exit came to an abrupt end, taking about $60,000 of my inheritance.

Merino told me that if my father put his home in a trust, it would have protected the property from deed fraud (and also avoided probate). These days, I’m the one urging all my friends to talk about these things with their parents. Because I know the price of silence is far higher than the awkwardness of discomfort — it collects as grief and logistical chaos you’re left to face when they are gone.