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Nurul Islamnuru, an immigrant from Bangladesh, rented a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, New York, with his wife, three children and father-in-law before, in July 2022, purchasing a four-bedroom home with a back yard for his kids to play in.

“I feel really proud,” said Islamnuru, who spent 18 years working as a busser and server at a California Pizza Kitchen and then worked in a souvenir shop at Times Square.

That excitement proved short-lived. Less than a year after the family moved in, a man called Mizanur Rahman – who had previously pleaded guilty to bank fraud and had been involved in earlier fraudulent transfers involving the property – was able to fraudulently transfer the deed.

Such “deed theft” has increased significantly in recent years in the US, prompting state and local governments to devote more attention to the issue.

Law enforcement has reported a rise in criminals fraudulently taking possession of people’s homes in states like Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York and Tennessee.

Experts attribute the uptick to a range of factors, including the increasing cost of real estate and technological advancements.

In response, states have passed legislation to better protect homeowners. New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, recently established an office of deed theft prevention.

“Fraud always has been and will be with us,” said Chris Morton, CEO of the American Land Title Association, which represents the title insurance industry. “The good news is, there has been significant collaboration, both within the industry, as well as with law enforcement and state policymakers” to address the crimes.

From 2019 through 2023, more than 58,000 victims nationwide reported $1.3bn in losses relating to real estate fraud, according to an FBI report.

Deed theft is when someone steals the title to a home without the homeowner’s knowledge or approval. The perpetrators often go door-to-door to reach people who are in “distress with regard to their home ownership”, said Jacob Inwald, director of litigation-economic justice at Legal Services NYC, which represents fraud victims.

The victims might be at risk of foreclosure because they are behind on mortgage payments or have a lien on their property, Inwald said.

“They will tell them, ‘We’re going to help you resolve your arrears in one way or another,’ without necessarily giving them a lot of detail, but they will have them sign a series of papers, the end result of which is the owner, usually without even knowing that this is what they are doing, has transferred title to their property,” Inwald said.

In New York City, there were 517 deed theft complaints in 2025, more than three times as many as just two years earlier, according to the state attorney general’s office.

In March, in a circuit court in Detroit, there were more than 600 cases in which people tried to get their homes back from a thief who used legal paperwork to steal their properties, the Detroit News reported.

“Generational wealth is being stolen, and people don’t even realize it’s happening,” a Detroit city council member, Mary Waters, said at a February deed fraud town hall attended by more than 150 people.

In a recent scheme, a Brooklyn attorney, Sanford Solny, told victims, who were primarily Black or Latino, that he was a financial expert who could negotiate with lenders to sell the homes for less than what was owed on a mortgage – a process known as a short sale – and help them avoid foreclosure, according to the Brooklyn district attorney.

Instead, “using an array of false statements, he tricked his victims into unwittingly signing over their deeds to corporations he controlled”, the district attorney stated.

Solny was convicted of 17 charges and sentenced to up to seven years in prison.

“When you lose title to your property, you’re not just losing the equity that you have invested – this is your life savings that have been stripped – but it’s also your home,” Inwald said. “These are often seniors who have been in these properties for decades.”

The scam has become more attractive because of how much real estate values have increased in recent years, Morton said.

Technology has “also lowered the barrier for criminals, who are using AI and digital tools to impersonate sellers, fake credentials, and make scams more sophisticated and harder to detect”, Morton said.

In 2023, 28% of title-insurance companies experienced at least one seller-impersonation fraud attempt, the land title association reported.

Lawmakers across the country have introduced legislation aimed at stopping the thefts. Texas recently enacted laws that allow a person to petition a district court for a review of alleged fraudulent documents recorded against their property and make it a crime to perform a notarization if the official is aware that the requester did not appear for the process.

In New York, the office of deed theft prevention will “expand strategic enforcement against deed theft, flag suspicious property filings, coordinate with law enforcement, conduct public education and outreach, promote preventive safeguards, and improve data-sharing across agencies”, a press release states.

In March, Mamdani also suspended the city’s program in which it sold property owners’ unpaid tax liens to investor-backed trusts, which then tried to collect unpaid bills with added fees. The city published a list of homes available as part of the lien sale, which gave a “road map to the scammers to go out and literally knock on the doors of at-risk homeowners and tell them, ‘We will solve all your problems,’” Inwald said.

Mamdani’s decision to pause such sales for six months is a “positive development, but there are many people who think it would be better if the city did not engage in a tax lien sale at all”, Inwald said.

While prosecutors and lawmakers cheered the move, Inwald would like to see the city hire more than just the office’s director, Peter White, a supervising attorney for homeowner assistance at the non-profit Access Justice Brooklyn.

A spokesperson for the New York City’s department of finance, which houses the deed theft office, stated in an email that the city plans to hire additional staff and routinely evaluate the office’s resources to ensure “it has the support it needs”.

In the meantime, Islamnuru, the Queens resident, has continued to live in his dream home, but more than three years after buying it, he still does have an undisputed title for it.

Even though Rahman was convicted of bank fraud in 2007 and a court declared invalid his purchase of the property – in which he forged his brother-in-law’s signature – Rahman allegedly again was able to obtain fraudulent notarization of the property at a US embassy in Bangladesh and transfer ownership of it to Merrick Capital, a company whose members are unknown, and another defendant in the case.

“This case highlights broader issues with the current system for deed recording,” said Leslie Wybiral, an attorney with Queens Legal Services who is representing Islamnuru. “New York’s recording system requires documents that appear valid on their face to be accepted, which can be exploited by bad actors. Even where fraud is clear, there is no fast way to correct the record, forcing victims into years-long litigation just to restore ownership.”

The lawsuit is ongoing.

“My wife, she cries sometimes,” Islamnuru said. “She says, ‘What happened to us?’”