For owners who have paid off the house

The deed thieves want is the one with no lender watching. Put your name in their way.

Two in five American homes now carry no mortgage¹, and the FBI says forgers comb public records for exactly those, because there is no lender at closing to notice a stranger selling your house³. A recorded Notice of Interest changes what happens at that closing: before any sale or loan on the property is insured, the title examiner has to reach you by certified mail and get your notarized say-so.

Start a notice See how it works

On the public record within days of filing
$99.00 once. County recording fee paid separately.
Florida today. Arizona, Nevada, Utah next.

Reserved for clerk's recording stamp

NOTICE OF INTEREST IN REAL PROPERTY

Parcel Identification Number: 12-34-56-7890-000-0010

Record owner(s): JOHN Q SAMPLE and JANE Q SAMPLE

1. Legal description. LOT 11, BLOCK B, PINE GROVE, ACCORDING TO THE PLAT THEREOF RECORDED IN PLAT BOOK 4, PAGE 12, OF THE PUBLIC RECORDS OF HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, FLORIDA.

2. Ownership. The undersigned is the record owner of the property described above.

3. Conveyances and encumbrances. The undersigned has not authorized, and does not intend to authorize, any conveyance or encumbrance of the property except as confirmed under section 4.

4. Verification. Any person examining title, closing a transaction, or underwriting a loan on this property is asked to contact the owner(s) by certified mail at the mailing address stated below and to obtain the owner's notarized written confirmation before proceeding.

Owner signatureNotary public

RECORDED IN OFFICIAL RECORDSINSTR# 2026394114BK 25412 PG 091709/21/2026 10:42 AMCLERK OF COURT & COMPTROLLERHILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, FL

For most of us the house is the biggest investment we will ever own. The simplest step you can take for it is a one-page letter on your title, recorded where every title search has to look.

It costs less than a year of any monitoring subscription, it is done once, and it stays on record until you release it at a sale.

A white single-story home with a tile roof, tidy lawn and tall palms under a blue sky

Where this is heading

More houses with no lender watching, and more fraudsters who have noticed

Owner-occupied homes with no mortgage: 39.4%; up from 34.4% a decade earlier; Census Bureau, 2024 ACS¹
Reported real estate fraud losses, 2025: $275M; up from $173 million in 2024, across 12,368 complaints; FBI IC3 2025 report²
Title companies that faced a seller-impersonation attempt in 2025: 59%; it was 28% the year before; ALTA 2026 study⁴
Losses reported to the FBI by Americans 60 and older, 2025: $7.75B; up 59% in a year, across 201,266 complaints; FBI IC3 2025 report¹⁰

How they pick a house

The shopping list is already public, or already stolen

The identity half comes from breaches. The 2024 National Public Data leak put roughly 2.9 billion records on the market, with names, current and past addresses, and Social Security numbers⁸, and the Identity Theft Resource Center counted 3,322 more breaches in 2025, a record⁷. The FBI's June 2026 alert on owner impersonation lists where the forger gets your details: "county or state public websites, data brokers, stolen account information, phishing schemes, or purchased from the dark web" ⁹.

The property half is not even stolen; it is published. Your county appraiser lists the owner's name, mailing address, and assessed value. The official records show whether any mortgage is on file. Zillow puts a market value next to the street address. A mailing address in another state says the owner is not home, a short-term-rental listing says when, and in Florida the tax roll even marks the senior exemption. None of that requires a hacker.

What used to take a crew a week of cross-referencing now takes a script. An AI model can join breach data to tax rolls, valuations, obituaries, and rental listings and rank thousands of parcels by equity, by the absence of a lender, and by the age and distance of the owner. That is why the next few years point at two groups: older owners, who already reported $7.75 billion in losses to the FBI in 2025, up 59 percent in a year¹⁰, and second homes and vacant parcels, where nobody is around to notice a sale until it has closed⁹.

The FBI's own advice in that alert, aimed at buyers, is to send a certified letter to the address of record on the tax roll before trusting a seller⁹. A recorded notice turns that from advice a careful buyer might follow into a step the title examiner has to take.

How the scheme works

Why your paid-off house, and why now

The forger does not need your keys. They pull your name and parcel from the same public records anyone can search, produce a deed or a mortgage in your name with a fake ID and a cooperating or fooled notary, and record it. Then they sell to a buyer who never meets you, or borrow against the house and vanish with the money. The FBI's Boston office put it plainly in 2025: scammers "comb through public records to find vacant parcels of land and properties that don't have a mortgage" ³. Between 2019 and 2023 its complaint center logged 58,141 real estate fraud victims and $1.3 billion in losses³.

A house with a mortgage has a lender whose payoff must be cleared at closing, which is where a stranger's sale tends to come apart. A house with no mortgage has nobody in that seat. That is the gap the notice fills.

Two things are making the forgery cheaper. Remote online notarization is now legal in most states and lets the signing happen over video, and in April 2026 a title technology firm described catching a deepfake impersonating a Maryland landowner during a remote notarization of a roughly $100,000 sale, built, in the words of the firm's product manager, with "commercial, off-the-shelf software that you can get" ⁵. The FBI counted 22,364 complaints referencing AI in 2025, with $893 million in losses². Meanwhile the equity on the table keeps growing: mortgage holders alone reached a record $18 trillion this year⁶, and the fully paid-off homes sit on top of that.

None of this is a reason to panic. It is a reason to file a one-page notice this month rather than next year.

An older couple on a sofa reading a letter together — The people forgers pick first: owners who have paid the house off and are not expecting anyone to test the title.

Plain terms

What the notice does, and what it does not

It does

Put a notice in the county's official records, indexed under your name and parcel.
Show up in every later title search on the property.
Require the title examiner to address it before insuring a sale or loan, by reaching you at your address of record.

It does not

Keep a recorder from accepting a forged document. Recorders file what is presented.
Catch a cash sale with no title search.
Replace your county's free recording alert. Step 3 of the kit enrolls you in it.

How it works

Four steps, one of them at a notary

Parcel record · Hillsborough County, FLMatched

Parcel ID: 222922-ZZZ-000005-0389
Roll year: 2026 preliminary
Situs: 1207 COLSON RD, PLANT CITY 33567
Mortgage of record: None
Vested owners: JOHN Q SAMPLE & JANE Q SAMPLE
Prior instrument: OR Book 12345, Page 678

1Parcel pulled from the county rolldone
2Notice drafted with the vested namesdone
3Signed, notarized, recorded by the clerknext
4Flagged on every future title searchthen

Step one, as it happens: the address matched to the county roll, the vested names pulled in, the notice drafted. Real roll fields, sample names.

Look up the parcel
Enter the address. We pull the parcel number, the legal description, and the names on the last deed, and fill the notice in.
Sign in front of a notary
Print it. Every owner on the deed signs at any local notary, with ID. In person because it works in every county, costs about ten dollars, and leaves you holding the stamped original.
Record it with the county
Mail it or walk it in with the exact fee, payee, address, and a cover letter from your kit. The county stamps it and sends the original back.
We watch for the stamp
Your tracker listens for the county's recording alert and reads the stamp off a photo. When it is on record, you get one email saying so.

Official Records · Search by parcel 222922-ZZZ-000005-0389

RecordedInstrumentPartiesStatus

2009-06-12WARRANTY DEED · BK 19345 PG 1122SAMPLE, JOHN Qvested

2009-06-12MORTGAGE · BK 19345 PG 1130FIRST BANK NAsatisfied

2023-11-02SATISFACTION OF MORTGAGE · INSTR 2023481902FIRST BANK NAreleased

2026-09-21NOTICE OF INTEREST · INSTR 2026394114SAMPLE, JOHN Q & JANE Qflagged

Examiner requirement before insuringContact record owner(s) by certified mail at the address of record and obtain notarized written confirmation. Notice of Interest recorded 2026-09-21.

The chain as the examiner reads it. Everything after the notice sits behind an open instruction to write to you first.

Why a title examiner has to address it

Nearly every sale and every mortgage in the United States is title-insured, and the examiner's job is to search the parcel, list everything recorded against it, and clear each item before the underwriter will insure. A forged deed on a free-and-clear house works because nothing in the record says "check with the owner first." The notice puts that instruction into the record, in the recorder's own format, with your mailing address of record.

Order is what makes it work. The county index is chronological, and the examiner reads the chain in order. Once your notice is on record, any later instrument on the parcel, however it was notarized, sits behind an open notice that tells the examiner to write to you first. A forged deed does not release it. Clearing it means a certified letter to your mailbox and your notarized reply, and no remote session substitutes for that. File it after a forged deed is already recorded and it still flags the deed for the next examiner, but by then you are cleaning up rather than stopping a closing. That is the whole case for filing now.

From the founder

I spent my career investigating fraud and defending companies against it. This is the simplest fix I know.

As an FBI Special Agent I saw how fraud cases actually end: not with the forgery being caught, but with a paper trail someone did or did not leave. As a Chief Information Security Officer at several leading US companies and institutions, I spent years watching attackers walk past expensive alarms because nobody had put a checkpoint where the money moves. After the National Public Data leak alone, a name, a Social Security number, and every address a person has lived at sell for a few dollars⁸, and there were 3,322 more breaches last year⁷. A forger no longer has to steal your identity. It is already for sale, sorted by ZIP code. And co-founding an AI company, AI StackOps, taught me how cheap a convincing fake ID, voice, or video call has become on top of it.

Deed fraud sits at the intersection of all three. The document is easy to forge, the owner is the last to know, and the closing has no one whose job is to ask the owner. A recorded notice puts that checkpoint in the one place every insured sale or loan has to pass through, and the checkpoint is a letter to your physical mailbox and your reply. A deepfake can get a forged deed notarized. It cannot answer your mail. In the age of AI, this was the first thing I told my own family to do. One page, on the record, before you need it.

Alex Borhani
Founder, Zone Shield LLC

Compared with the alternatives

Option	Cost	On the record?	When it acts
County fraud alert	Free	No	Emails you after something records. The kit enrolls you.
Title monitoring subscription	Monthly, ongoing	No	Also after the fact.
Notice of Interest kit	$99.00 once, plus the county fee	Yes	At the next title search, before a sale or loan is insured.

Price

One payment, and it stays on record until you release it

$99.00

Your county charges its own recording fee when you file, about $10 for the first page and $8.50 for each page after that in Florida. The notary charges you directly; Florida caps it at $10 per signature.

Start a notice

Buying it for a parent? Gift a notice. They get a code by email on the day you choose, they do the signing, and the code never expires.

The kit includes

The notice, pre-filled from the county record and rendered to your state's recording format
Notary instructions: who signs, what ID to bring, the state fee cap
Enrollment in your county's free recording alert
Exact fee, payee, mailing and walk-in address, cover letter, checked by our staff and dated
Recording detection and one email when it is on record
A free regenerated notice if the clerk sends it back

Questions

Before you start

Does this stop deed fraud?

No single thing does. A recorder can still accept a forged deed. What the notice changes is the next step: any insured sale or loan requires the examiner to address your notice, and clearing it means reaching you. A forger who cannot get past that step does not get paid. Timing matters: the notice does its best work when it is already in the record before a forged instrument arrives, because the examiner reads the chain in order. That is why we say file now, not after something happens.

Will my county record it?

The notice is rendered to your state's statutory recording format (in Florida, section 695.26), and each state's template is reviewed by counsel before we sell it there. Fee, payee, and addresses come from the clerk's own site and show the date our staff last checked them. If a clerk rejects it, we regenerate it free.

The county alert is free. Why pay?

Enroll in it; step 3 of the kit walks you through it. The alert tells you after a document records, which is the point at which you are already hiring a lawyer. The notice acts before a sale or loan is insured.

I still have a mortgage. Is this for me?

Yes, if you have real equity. Forgers prefer paid-off homes because there is no lender in the way, but a home-equity loan taken out in your name works the same way, and the FBI's figures include both. If you are close to paying off, filing now means the notice is already on record on the day the lender's lien comes off.

What becomes public?

Your names exactly as they appear on the deed, the legal description, and a mailing address, which the tax roll already publishes. Never a phone number, an email, or a date of birth. Your email is used for the kit and tracker only.

Do I need a lawyer?

We prepare a document; we do not give legal advice. In states where attorneys customarily handle recordings, the kit says so and suggests a review. Every state we sell in has had its template reviewed by counsel first.

I do not live in the house. Can I still file?

Yes, and those are the houses that need it most: a vacation home, a rental, a house you inherited, or the one you moved out of and kept. Forgers look for owners who are not around to notice. The notice goes on the parcel, wherever you live. The mailing address you print on it is where the title examiner's certified letter will go, so use the address where you actually get mail, not the property. One notice covers one parcel; file another for each property you own. If the house belongs to someone else, a parent for instance, the owner has to sign it, but you can pay for it as a gift and they get a code by email.

My home is in a trust or an LLC.

Supported. The trustee or manager signs in that capacity, and the kit lists the authority documents to bring to the notary and the clerk: a certification of trust, or the state filing and the resolution naming the signer.

Does this affect my will, trust, or estate plan?

No. The notice is not a lien, it does not transfer or restrict ownership, and it does not change who inherits. You can still put the home in a trust, leave it in a will, refinance, or sell. It asks anyone examining title to confirm with the owner first. If you move the home into a trust after recording the notice, the trustee handles that confirmation from then on.

What happens to the notice after I die?

It stays on record. The person handling your estate, a personal representative under a will or a successor trustee under a trust, clears it the same way you would: the title examiner sends the certified letter to the address on the notice, and they answer it with their notarized confirmation and the papers that show their authority, such as letters of administration or a certification of trust. It does not slow probate. Tell that person the notice exists and keep the recorded original with your deed.

Will a Notice of Interest affect my credit score?

No. It is recorded with the county, not reported to Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion. It is not a loan, a lien, or a judgment, so nothing about it reaches a credit file. When you later apply for a mortgage or a home equity loan, the lender's title examiner sees it in the county record and sends you the certified letter; your confirmation clears it, and your credit report never comes into it.

What happens when I sell or refinance?

Tell the title company up front that a Notice of Interest is recorded and where to send the certified inquiry. You reply with the notarized confirmation. At closing, a recorded release takes the notice off; the tracker gives you the release kit.

Your biggest investment deserves one page on the record to decrease the risk of it being stolen.

$99.00 once. Available in Florida; Arizona, Nevada, Utah next.