After a number of I-Team investigations into stolen land scams and attempted property theft, the FBI office in Boston is taking action. People who own homes and people who work in real estate are being warned by the FBI to watch out for these schemes.
All of these are different homes, but the theft is the same.
The I-Team reports
She told the I-Team last summer that she never sold her land and was shocked when she found out it was gone. Halla and her husband Omar found that thieves had taken their empty land in Concord.
The thieves then sold it to someone, who used the land to start building a house. What Omar says is “they stole our dream.”
Someone came to John Grimes’s Plymouth home and knocked on the door. “It was an engineering firm and they wanted to do a plot plan for the property that’s being sold,” said Grimes. “I told him Don’t do anything because you are in a scam!” I thought, “Oh my God, this is still going on.”
Philip claims that thieves almost took away his senior parents’ Cape Cod waterfront access land after putting it up for sale. “My mother was in a state of panic she said ‘absolutely not, the land is not on sale,'” he shared.
In some cases, the thieves pretended to be the owners by using fake driver’s IDs.
Specifically aimed at older people
The FBI says it can’t talk about specific cases but that thieves seem to target a certain group.
“Our elderly population because they are more likely to own vacant pieces land that they have had for quite some time, and they are also more likely to own homes without any mortgages on them,” the FBI’s Vivian Barrios said. “Because those have the biggest benefit to the criminal actor.”
There are more cases of land theft across the country, and now there are more cases in our area as well. This is why the FBI office in Boston sent out a warning about “title pirates.”
From 2019 to 2023, 2,301 people in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island lost more than $61.5 million.
Report theft right away
Special Agent Barrios says that victims should report the theft right away because time is of the essence in these situations. “We find that within a 24-hour window we can sometimes get to the money before it’s left the account and the banks together with us can sometimes get the money back to the victims,” said Barrios.
People like Grimes, who almost lost his home, are worried about the growing number of cases. “It’s really frightening for a homeowner,” he told me.
Because of the I-Team stories that aired last year, every Massachusetts registry of deeds now lets homeowners sign up for a free alert that will let them know whenever a document is recorded on their property. People who own land can also report fraud to the FBI on their website.
