Someone Filed a Document Against My Property. What Now?

Something has been recorded against your property that you did not authorise. This page is about what to do now, in order. If you are here before anything has happened and want to understand how it works, read can someone steal my house with a fake deed instead.

First, the reassuring part

A forged deed is generally void. Not voidable, void: a signature that was never yours cannot transfer what it purported to transfer, and courts treat it accordingly. You have almost certainly not lost your house.

The harm is practical. Until the record is cleared, the public file shows a cloud on your title. That can stall a sale or a refinance, and a determined fraudster may try to borrow against the property in the window before anyone notices. What this costs you is time, legal fees and attention, which is bad enough to move quickly on.

The order to do things in

Get the document. Ask your county recorder for a certified copy of what was filed. You need the exact instrument, its recording date and its number. Everything else depends on having it in hand.

Report it twice. Many recorders now run a fraud unit or an affidavit process for exactly this, so start there. Then file a police report. You are not expecting the police to fix it. You are creating a dated record that the filing was reported as fraudulent, which your attorney and your insurer will both want.

Call a real-estate attorney. This is the step people try to skip, and it is the one that actually resolves it. A county recorder is a custodian, not a judge. They record what is presented and have no power to decide a document is void, so removing it is a court process, commonly a quiet title action.

Notify your title insurer. If you hold an owner's policy from when you bought, it may cover defending your title, which can matter more than anything else on this list. Policies differ, so ask specifically about the cost of clearing a fraudulent recording.

While that runs

Check what else is recorded against the parcel, since a fraudulent filing often arrives with company. Watch your credit for loans you did not take out, particularly if the document was a mortgage or a line of credit. And if you have not already, enrol in your county's free fraud-alert programme so the next filing reaches you in days.

How they knew what to file

Filing a convincing document takes your legal name as it appears on title, your parcel number, and the legal description. All of that is public record, which is what makes this possible and also what makes it unpreventable in the strict sense. What is not inevitable is how easy you are to package into a target list, which is where how these lists get built comes in. Vacant, inherited and out-of-state property is picked first, because nobody is walking past it.