A veteran broker shares the warning signs brokers should be looking for to help prevent scams
Deed theft has been climbing up the agenda in New York, and mortgage brokers are starting to encounter it in their pipelines. It is exactly what it sounds like: someone takes a homeowner's house through forged documents, fabricated signatures, and title transfers that the real owner never agreed to.
It tends to show up in markets where property values have surged far beyond what original owners ever expected, and few places fit that description better than New York City right now.
According to the New York State Attorney General's office, deed theft happens in one of two ways: a thief forges a homeowner's signature on a deed and files it with the county clerk, or a homeowner signs their deed over to a thief without realizing what they are signing.
Criminals primarily target properties in foreclosure, homes with tax or utility liens, abandoned properties, and estates where the owner has died and heirs have not transferred title. Seniors, immigrants, and people of color are also disproportionately targeted.
Kevin Leibowitz (pictured top), founder and mortgage broker at Grayton Mortgage in Brooklyn, has seen enough of all three to recognize them early. The neighborhoods he works in are full of properties that sold for a song decades ago and are now worth several million dollars, and that gap draws the wrong kind of attention.
"Never underestimate people's ability to figure out ways to separate you from your money when there's money to be had," Leibowitz told Mortgage Professional America. "It's just a really bad thing."
A growing problem in NYC
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani established the city's first Mayor's Office of Deed Theft Prevention in April, appointing attorney Peter White as its director. The move came as complaints to the New York Attorney General's office jumped 240% between 2023 and 2025, from 149 to 517 annually, with more than 3,500 complaints filed across the five boroughs between 2013 and 2023.
"Deed theft preys on the New Yorkers who can least afford it," Mamdani said. "Families who have spent decades building stability and generational wealth are being targeted and displaced through complex scams that exploit gaps in oversight."
It’s not just deed theft that scammers are using to take advantage of these homeowners. Serial refinancing is another growing trend. In the refinancing scam, equity disappears slowly, one loan at a time, often before anyone realizes what is happening.
"Each time that they do a serial refinance, they keep refinancing the same borrowers and putting more and more fees in," Leibowitz said. "The borrowers are left with less and less equity as time goes on."
He has seen serial refinance scams cost homeowners their property. One bad refinance after another, adding money to a mortgage loan without providing cash out to the borrower. These loans enriched the lenders who did them, and were one of the frequent occurrences during the housing crisis of the early 2000s.
"That serial refinance is what puts some of these people in the situation where they're behind," Leibowitz said. "And when they're behind, they reach out to somebody who's not helping."
Once a homeowner is behind, the deed theft operators tend to show up. Some pose as cash buyers. Some offer to take over mortgage payments. Some use forged documents or take advantage of homeowners who do not read what they are signing.
What brokers need to catch
Leibowitz took a call from a man trying to help an elderly relative with a cash-out refinance to cover a tax issue. The relative owned a multimillion-dollar property free and clear and had taken out two separate mortgages totaling over $350,000 within an 18-month window.
His younger relative was now supposedly helping his uncle with this refinance, which would produce $270,000 cash-out.
When Leibowitz spoke directly with the homeowner, nothing in the story matched up. It was clear the homeowner was being scammed. Leibowitz passed on the loan. Sadly, he doesn’t believe every originator would have done the same thing.
"There are brokers that willfully facilitate this," he said. "They're more worried about their commission than the well-being of their clients. It's the same kind of thing that happened during the subprime crisis. People said, 'Well, everybody's doing it. They're not going to do the loan with me, they're going to do it with somebody else.'"
He said 15 minutes of due diligence is often enough for brokers to spot these scams. A web search can surface court filings or foreclosure actions. Pulling recorded documents through a public database can reveal a serial refinancing pattern no one mentioned during the initial call. Asking who else is involved, who made the referral, and why the transaction is happening now can change the picture entirely.
Leibowitz has no patience for those who skip that step.
"It's gross," he said. "At the end of the day, I am 100% a capitalist. I am 100% a for-profit business. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do things."
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