‘It is not real': Title company owner warns of new twist to title fraud

It didn’t take long for Lauren Albrecht to start seeing red flags.

“It’s women’s intuition,” Albrecht, the president of Florida Title and Trust said. “I just felt something was off.”

Once her title company got the contract for the sale of a vacant lot in Hallandale Beach, Lauren got right to work to make sure the sale was legitimate.

“The first red flag that I received was a driver’s license from West Virginia,” she said. “When we did our research, I noticed that the property tax bills since 1978 had been sent to Nassau, Bahamas.”

Albrecht did some more research and asked for a proof of life video.

“And we started getting pushback with, you know, she’s hard of hearing,” Albrecht said she was told about the owner.

A few days later, she got an unexpected email, saying the seller was ready for a video call. During the call, she said it quickly became apparent she was looking at a fake video, instead of an actual person. The video showed a woman, sitting in a room, looking straight at the camera. Albrecht could be heard asking the woman to raise her hand, but the woman did not react.

“After the second pause, I realized this is 100% a video playing on a loop,” she said. “It is not real.”

She said the video got her thinking about how many title companies would have actually accepted it as proof of life.

“If the woman says she can’t hear and you see the face and it looks similar, ok, check, done, let’s go on to the next,” Albrecht said.

“What I am really happy about in this situation is this title company really did the right thing,” said Marty Kiar, Broward County’s property appraiser.

Kiar said this wasn’t the first time he had heard of scammers using fake videos to try to trick closing agents.

“So far, we have one case dealing with AI,” he said. “I have a feeling it’s going to be much, much more very soon and that’s why people need to be very vigilant.”

Albrecht said she never heard again from the alleged seller, but she did do some more digging. A reverse image search of the picture on the identification provided by the scammer matched the image of a woman from California who was reported missing years ago.

“I felt really bad to have her picture come up,” she said. “The family already went through enough and to see their family member possibly come up again in this type of use, it’s just really sad.”

Kiar said you should be extra cautious if a seller is only communicating over text or email since that could be a red flag.

You can sign up to receive an alert if there has been a title change associated with your property.

If you own property in Broward, you can learn more about the program here.

To sign up for Miami-Dade County’s fraud alert program, click here.