One of the most common questions that comes up during estate planning consultations at my office is based on commercials on late-night television and ads that sometimes pop up on social media. What are those commercials selling? Title lock insurance.
What’s their pitch? The commercials suggest that identity thieves may steal the ownership of people’s homes by fraudulently filing deeds, mortgages, or other legal documents with forged signatures of the owners — and the owners would never know it. Then, as a result of those forged and fraudulent documents, the owners would have to move out of their own home or pay large sums of money to “repay” a debt they never incurred. To be clear, I do not recommend title lock insurance of any kind, for three primary reasons:
1). Title theft is extremely rare.
As an estate planning attorney who has been practicing law for over 20 years, I have seen a lot of things — and have accumulated client stories that are inspiring, infuriating, and everything in between. I have had the privilege of serving hundreds of families and thousands of individuals in a variety of ways. And I have never once seen an example of title theft as described in the title lock commercials.
Could an identity thief forge a deed and file it with the county to try and take someone’s house? Sure ...
