Access Title Agency works diligently to identify potential fraudulent transactions. Escrow Officer, Marcy McKamey, did just that, and quickly took steps to identify a fraudulent seller:
“When the listing agent sent the executed contract my way she indicated that she did not know the seller and received the request through a lead generation platform to list the property. We asked the seller to provide his driver’s license and requested if he had a preference of us overnighting the closing package to the billing address on the tax bill, or if he wanted mobile notary arrangements to that address. He immediately resisted and requested that we just email the closing package to him and didn’t provide the driver’s license. I again asked him for the driver’s license and acknowledged that emailing the closing package was not an option. He proceeded to provide pushback, asking why we were making this so difficult, but did provide his NJ driver’s license. Our listing agent has family in NJ and asked them to provide us a copy of their driver’s license, since we knew it valid to compare. There were enough discrepancies with the seal & format that drew additional red flags.
“He then proceeded to say that he was an international truck driver and would be at his corporate office in GA to overnight the package there. I then asked what day and time he would be available at his corporate office for us to send a mobile notary, that overnighting to his office would not be acceptable.
“With an abundance of red flags at this time, we proceeded to overnight a letter to the billing address listed with the tax collector to advise that we were the title company for a contract on this property, and needed to validate that we were working with the true owner of record. It was the next day that I received a call from the true owner of record’s attorney, that they had not entered into a contract and that this was fraud.”