How Families Are Losing Homes to Deed Theft in NYC

Housing Expert Leah Goodridge Explains How the Crime Really Works, and Why Almost No One Goes to Jail

Deed theft, a crime wherein a person is robbed of the title to their property without their consent and/or knowledge, is rampant in the Big Apple.

In recent years, viral videos depicting homeowners abruptly losing their properties to unfamiliar claimants have circulated widely on social media, sparking outrage and raising urgent questions. Are these isolated incidents, or part of a larger pattern? And if deed theft is on the rise, what’s actually driving it?

Today, we sat down with Brooklyn-based housing policy expert and former tenant rights attorney Leah Goodridge to discuss the complex, viral phenomena of deed theft and property fraud (two related but slightly different types of thievery) to see how and why vulnerable people in the five boroughs of NYC are losing their homes.

Deed Theft or Property Fraud? What Is Really Happening in New York City’s Streets?

In Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, at a recent town hall, residents from across New York City’s five boroughs gathered to share firsthand accounts of their properties being stolen. Overwhelmingly, the victims were people of color, many of them elderly as well. They went on to describe lengthy legal battles against fraudulent individuals and corporations.

These incidents of deed theft and property fraud wiped out years of carefully planned black generational wealth instantly.

Among them was 46-year-old Crown Heights native Sherease Torain, whose deed to the family home at 964 Park Pl. came into question after scammers convinced her elderly grandmother, Ida Robinson, to sign over her mortgage title in exchange for a cash loan.

What followed was a decade-long fight to reclaim the family property and the deed they had worked so hard to obtain.

“This horror started when my grandmother was 93 years old,” said Torain, according to town hall coverage from the BK Reader.

Her story is emblematic of the rise in this troubling crime, but it is also just a drop in the bucket of a veritable ocean of similar tales. According to the New York State Attorney General’s office, 517 complaints of deed theft rippled across the city in 2025 alone, reflecting a 240% increase in the illicit behavior.

City Planning Commissioner Leah Goodridge was the motivating force behind the town hall gathering that highlighted real-life accounts. In an exclusive interview with Invisible People reporters, she explained the rampant, often misunderstood crime that is causing the tragic loss of land, stability, and generational wealth.

“Deed theft is when someone takes the title, the actual deed, to your home, and does so fraudulently,” said Goodridge. “I think part of the confusion is that deed theft is one type of property crime, and there are other similar property crimes that fall under the broader umbrella term of property fraud. What’s going on in New York City is that a lot of people are very focused on the dynamics of who this is happening to and who is doing the crime.”

Deed Theft and Other Types of Property Fraud Can Happen to Anyone, and a Wide Range of People Are Perpetrators

Goodridge went on to explain that deed fraud doesn’t always happen the way it’s being portrayed online. The victims are often African American or Latino families that own properties, but the perpetrators range racially and ethnically. This is important because property fraud can be committed by someone you’ve trusted, a person who looks a lot like you. It can also be committed by a total stranger, a corporation, a faith leader, or someone you’d never suspect.

“Deed theft is predominantly happening in gentrifying areas specifically to black and Latino families. In terms of the people who are doing it, that’s a mixed bag. When I grew up in NYC, I would often hear these stories of white men in suits showing up to your door and trying to get the homeowner to sign a sweet deal. Today, deed thieves are working in entire operations, and they’re a lot more diverse.”

“One Black elder told me a Black woman attorney introduced her to the deed thieves. That comfort level was how they all were able to scam her,” Goodridge explained. “You might meet someone at church or bingo and think ‘I randomly met this person’ when in fact, they’ve been targeting you for a while. They play the long game.”

“In terms of the broader crime of property fraud, some partition sales, where a family member sells their portion of a property to an ‘investor’. Then, that investor forces a partition sale because they try to take over the whole property. This is a lot more nuanced, but also common. These are often the incidents where people are sitting in their living room, and just because their nephew, who owns a marginal percentage of the property, sold their share to an ‘investor’, someone shows up with paperwork and tries to take their house.”

“This isn’t necessarily categorized as deed theft, but it is predatory, and the homeowner is often caught off guard, especially because the relative who sells may not tell them.”

How People Lose Their Homes to Fraudsters

There are too many ways to lose your home to scammers. Goodridge described a few.

“One of the ways scammers can steal your home is through refinancing schemes. You try to refinance the mortgage, and then the people that you’re dealing with are actually deed thieves. You believe you’re refinancing, when in actuality, the legal language on the piece of paper is just you signing over your home to them. That’s an example of deed theft.”

“Another example is something one of the lawyers who came to an event that I hosted, who works at the city bar, described. In his case, he had a client who was in prison, but had his name on the family property. His brother came to visit him in prison and said, ‘Hey, I just need you to sign this thing to help with the house.’ In fact, the paperwork was just the man in prison signing the house over to his brother. So, then he gets out of prison not knowing he no longer has any rights to the house.”

“Other incidents mistakenly called deed theft are actually partition sales. This is when, unbeknownst to them, a family member sells their share of the property to a scammer. In a lot of the instances that I’ve heard, the person was scammed because they felt a level of comfort with the scammer or scammers, who were deed thieves.”

“For example, there was a man in Park Slope named Ray Cortez. He had his home for decades, and he thought he was refinancing. The person he was dealing with was someone he met at his church. Cortez is from Peru. The guy he was dealing with was Wilson Calle, who was also Latino. There was a level of comfort derived from having similar religious affiliations and ethnic backgrounds.”

“He also worked with a nonprofit; he told him, ‘I can help you refinance’. So he worked with him, partially due to this deceptive level of comfort. This deed thief was working with disbarred attorneys, as they normally do. They work in teams a lot. Together, the team of fraudsters took Cortez’s record and his whole property.”

“These are just a few examples showing that property fraud can happen in a variety of ways,” Goodridge concluded.

Redlining, Racial Disparities, and Unjust Legislation: Why The Government Must Do More to Prevent Property Fraud

Across the US, and perhaps even more specifically, in New York City, legislation has systemically targeted African American people with harsher prison sentencing. A really good example of this can be seen in the notorious “War on Drugs”.

In the ‘80s, the streets were flooded with a very addictive substance called cocaine, which was distributed in its powder form in predominantly white neighborhoods and in a smokable form called crack cocaine in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Essentially, this was the same drug, but prison sentencing for crack cocaine possession was much harsher in Black neighborhoods under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.

This law exhibited a 100-1 sentencing disparity, causing African Americans to go to prison more often and for lengthier sentences than their white counterparts for committing the same crimes with essentially the same illegal substance.

In addition to unjust legislation targeting African American neighborhoods, generational disparities, including but not limited to redlining, created obstacles to homeownership for African American households. It is for this reason, Goodridge explained, that there is a great deal of rage aimed at the Justice System when people see Black and Latino homeowners being targeted by white businessmen whose crimes go largely unpunished.

“Sometimes, in these viral videos, you see cops standing right outside, and that’s because these deed thieves have a legal document saying that they’re the new owner. So they’re standing there with the marshal to take possession of what the law says is their new property,” said Goodridge.

“My insistence on fighting deed theft by legal enforcement is grounded in the fact that I’ve met too many families who won, and the deed thieves never spent a single day in jail,” she continued. “They’re fighting this in civil court because the city is not taking the deed theft and property fraud to task. They’re not prosecuting them. And when I have asked about that, what I hear is that deed theft is just a very complex crime; it’s so hard to get these folks.”

“But this is why there’s so much anger in the community. I’m a commissioner. I’ve been helping tenants fight back for well over a decade. And what I’m witnessing is a lack of trust because nobody goes to jail, and in a lot of cases, these folks still don’t get their properties back.”

“There’s also a lot of blame games. People are constantly pointing fingers and saying, how could you allow this to happen? They are trying to essentially blame the victim, saying they should have gotten their paperwork together or done this and that.”

“But it isn’t the homeowners who need to protect themselves. This is on the city,” Goodridge said. “There should be harsher consequences and greater enforcement. This is why the impacted communities have raised the racial disparity: who is stealing while still not going to prison for it.”

“It doesn’t just stop at the fact that most of the victims are black and Latino and many of the deed thieves are white. There’s also a conversation about why this crime has been ongoing for decades, all while not being prosecuted with the ferocity as someone jumping a turnstile.”

Talk to Your Legislators About Housing Justice

When a person becomes homeless, they can be arrested for simply surviving. Standing, sitting, sleeping, and publicly storing belongings are criminal offenses in every city in the US.

But when people commit crimes that cause others to become homeless, such as self-help evictions, deed theft, and property fraud, these criminals rarely spend a single day in jail. It is high time our laws put people’s rights over profits. One way to do that is to make housing a human right for all.