8-21-24 *INTERVIEW* How to Help Protect Against Mortgage and Title Fraud with Matt Cox

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And I saw a very interesting piece over at CBS
News a couple of days back, maybe a week ago,
a little less entitled Elvis Presley's family targeted and massive
fraud scheme. It's it's just a hell of a story,
and joining us to talk about it is Matt Cox.
And Matt, at some point in his life was a
naughty boy and he got in trouble for it, and he, uh,

(00:24):
the stuff that he was naughty about makes him an
expert in what we're gonna talk about today. So, Matt,
if you don't mind, tell us how you were naughty
and then we will jump into why that makes you
expert about what we're going to talk about today.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
So I committed roughly fifty five million dollars worth of fraud,
and a significant.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Portion of that fraud was title theft.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
So you know, you want to quick you want to
be a quick breakdown on what yes gam was? Yes, okay,
So that the scam that I am most well known
for is I would either swap deeds in some way
or capacity.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
I would basically steal the person's deed. And you could this.
There's many ways to do this.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
So one of them was, let's say I would rent
a rental property from someone. I would then either assume
that person's name, satisfy any loans on the property, and
then borrow against the property. So I'll give you an example.
One time, I I rented a house that was worth
about two hundred thousand. I then turned around and borrowed

(01:34):
roughly I want to say, roughly four hundred thousand dollars
in mortgages on that residence, put the money in the bank,
pull the money out of the bank in cash, and
took off. And then the you know, by the time
the owner, the true owner actually figures it out, he's
being foreclosed on by multiple mortgage companies up. So that's

(01:54):
one of those the things I would do. Or I
would satisfy loans, I would add a loan onto someone's
house and then refinance the house to pay that loan off.
And there's there's many different variations. And of course, one
of those variations is what what the person involved in
I think your name is Findley, Lisa Findley, did on

(02:17):
Elvis's property on Graceland.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
I'm still fascinated by your story, if you don't mind,
before we get to Graceland. So, these these these scams
that you described, Did you think of them yourself?

Speaker 3 (02:30):
I mean, yeah, for the most part.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
At the time I was doing it, it was not
as prevalent as it is today. Today, there are thieves
doing this constantly. They're assuming owner's names and then borrowing
mortgages on their houses. There there are thieves that are
going and going down to public records and transferring the
deed to someone's house from the true owner's name into

(02:54):
some type of an associate of their's name, and then
they would sell the house or borrow against the house.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
There's lots of different variation. You can live in the house.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I had someone one time that was actually living in
their house, and I just assumed the.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
Guy's name, and then I satisfied the loan that he
had or the lean and he had on his house,
and I.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Borrowed three or four mortgages on that house while he
was living there.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
He didn't know anything about it until the police showed up.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
Wow, we're talking with Matt Cox, who spent twelve years
in prison. I think about this stuff. He's now advising
home Title Lock, which actually a company that has been
an advertiser on my show in years past, and he's
advising home title lock on helping people to prevent against
some of these these types of frauds, really remarkable, remarkable stories.

(03:43):
When when you were doing this stuff, did you feel
bad about it at the time?

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Everybody says to ask that, why that must be a
standard question. I mean, you know at the time. No,
I didn't feel bad about it. I mean, you know,
I'm I'm a fraudster. You can't expect a fraudster to
feel bad at me. You know, the you know, the
was it the shark doesn't feel bad for the you know,
for the fish, and it's just you just these people

(04:08):
made the mistake of crossing my path and and you know,
I mean, I understand it's a horrific thing, but yeah,
you can't count on criminals to feel bad about what
they've done.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
In those situations, like when the police show up with it.
You took out a bunch of mortgages, assuming the guy
who quote unquote owns the house even though you took
ownership from him, can prove that he's the owner and
he didn't take out the mortgage and all that stuff.
Does someone like that still get foreclosed on or do
they end up somehow being able to keep the house

(04:41):
and the bank takes the loss or what happens there.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
So i' mean one, I've had the police show up
and actually pick up the owners and take them downtown
because they thought they were involved in some way. And
the bank's definitely foreclose on the properties. And if the
true owner is lucky and has enough money, he can
maybe hire an attorney.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
To stop that foreclosure process.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
The real problem is that when this happens to someone
who doesn't have the means to go out and hire
an attorney, you know, by the time it may be
too late. I mean they look, listen the Graceland thing,
They got all the way to the foreclosure process.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, that's remarkable. Let's talk about Graceland. So you mentioned
her name, Lisa Findley. She's fifty three years old, and
maybe if you know the details, if you have them
at your fingertips, maybe you can just talk a little
bit about the steps that she took to essentially try
to steal Graceland. It was this was not a very
simple fraud. Well maybe you think it was by your standards.

(05:45):
To me, it seemed like there were a lot of steps.
There's a lot of Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts,
but and it depends on. In her particular case, what
she did was placed a.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Mortgage on the property and then that she started for
she waited. She either backdated a document or she waited
a few years, and once Elvis's daughter, who's that was
the true owner, had passed, she then started the foreclosure process,
stating that she had taken out three point eight million

(06:18):
dollars on and use Grace Land as the collateral, and
that she had made any payments since she was in
the process of foreclosing.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
Luckily, her daughter was able to.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Hire an attorney and stop it just before they lost
the property.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
I mean, you would think that somewhere in the system,
whether it's a judge or a title company or a
bank or somebody would jump in there and say, wait,
this isn't right, that loan isn't real, or that person
isn't real, or that like, why doesn't this stuff get stuck?
Where's the due diligence?

Speaker 2 (06:53):
So that's a kind of a misconception on people's part
is that they think, let's say if I file a
d let for instance, Let's say I make a deed
to your house and I go downtown and I record
that deed in public records. Public records, even if they
believe the deed is fraudulent, they have to record the document.
It's not up to public records to question those documents.

(07:13):
As long as the document's filled out correctly and notarized
and signed and witnessed, they're going to record it in
the system. They can't even if you realize what even
if you were notified somehow and you went down and said, hey,
this is what's going on, can you correct it?

Speaker 3 (07:27):
They cannot correct that.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
You would have to go through a re court of
law to do that. So no one's calling to make
sure that the notary stamp is real, or that the
notary really signed the document, or that let's say you
satisfied a mortgage. No one's calling the mortgage company from
public records to say, hey, was this mortgage really satisfied.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
No one's double checking.

Speaker 4 (07:51):
It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
I mean, maybe just if you could elaborate again on
just how close this woman got to actually being.

Speaker 4 (08:00):
Able to steal graceland.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
I mean, if you know, if Elvis's granddaughter, who I
believe is representing the property at this point, had she
not been notified and hired or had attorneys able to
go down and stop the process. Then Graceland would have
been lost, it would have been foreclosed on, and Finley

(08:25):
would have ended up owning that property because it was
very close, very answer short, very close.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
So she claimed that she loaned the money to the
Presley family and that they didn't make the payments in there,
and the house was the collateral, and she's going to
take the house.

Speaker 4 (08:44):
Is that it?

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yes? Yes, wow?

Speaker 1 (08:50):
And and so I'm trying to think of So there
really isn't a bank in that conversation, right, it's just.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Now you don't You don't really have to have a bank.
You could be a lender. You don't have to be
licensed to be a lender. You could be a lender
if you have a few million dollars you want to
lend it out to people. That's a you could be
considered a lender. You're you're called a hard money lender.
You're lending your own money. You don't have to be
a licensed wow. So and not that there's a real
lender involved in this, by.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
The way, this is clearly something she fabricated.

Speaker 4 (09:23):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
We're talking with Matt Cox, who has, as as you
heard his stories, done some things in the past that
he spent a dozen years in prison for mortgage fraud
and titled fraud and so on.

Speaker 4 (09:33):
He's an advisor to home Title Luck.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
Now, I want to go back to you for a second.

Speaker 4 (09:38):
What did you do immediately after you got it?

Speaker 1 (09:40):
How long have you been out of prison, and what
did you do immediately after you got out to make
a living?

Speaker 2 (09:46):
I started doing keynote speeches to UH cybersecurity companies, to
credit credit union conventions, you know, banking conventions. You know,
they have five six hundred people get together every you know,
maybe it's annually or quarterly, and they have a keynote
speaker come in and I would go in and I
would explain what, you know, what I'd done, and I would,

(10:09):
you know, give them guidance and do a Q and
A session. And then I also meet with the local
sheriff's departments of h five or six different counties in Florida.
UH have had me come in and speak with their
financial Crimes division about this specific crime. I've also spoken
with Hillsboro County, which is another county in Florida. They've

(10:32):
had me in the public records has had me in
to talk about this crime.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
M oh and and then of.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Course, I also, you know, hooked up or got in
contact with Home Title Locke and I've been working with them.
I I you know that, which has been great. It's
a great service that they provide.

Speaker 4 (10:50):
I see you've got a wedding ring on.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Did you get married before or after you were in
prison or while you were in prison?

Speaker 4 (10:58):
No?

Speaker 3 (10:58):
I met my wife in the halfway house.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
She had just gotten out of prison, and we got
married about three years later.

Speaker 3 (11:07):
We dated for three years and then we got married.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
Wow. Well that's an unusual story.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
A listener has a question, and I'm not sure if
this is the right Is there some such a thing
called a quick deed or is it quit quy t?

Speaker 4 (11:20):
What's the right term quit? Quit?

Speaker 2 (11:22):
It's a quit It's a a quit claim deed, which
is where you quit your interest in the property.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
So a listener says, if you have a quit claim
deed on your house and someone else files one on
your house to try to do fraudulent stuff, does does
anybody does the county anybody look into that to see
if there's already been a quit claim on that house.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
Well, if you had had your property quit claim deeded
to someone else. So let's say you quit claim deeded
it to someone else, you should have recorded it in
public records. If you just fold the document up and
walk around with it in your pocket, then you know
that's that's that's an issue because there's no there's no
real proof of witness occurred, so someone else. It's really

(12:10):
kind of whoever gets to the courthouse first, and then
if you were to file it afterward, you would probably
have to fight that out in court, so you know,
as quickly as you can get that document signed.

Speaker 4 (12:23):
Now.

Speaker 3 (12:24):
The problem also is.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
That no, the public records is not going to there's
no one public records that going is going to chase
down who was first, who was second? Is this document
correctly notarized and filled out, And as long as it's
filled out correctly, it's notarized and witnessed, they're going to
record it, and that property is probably going to be

(12:46):
taken from the owner's current owner's name and placed in
whoever he quick claim deeded it too.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
Well, Listener asks, would there be any benefit to keeping
open a small keylock or second mortgage to help prevent
being foreclosed upon by a fraudster?

Speaker 2 (13:06):
So I mean that may be an issue for some fraudsters.
I would say that for an accomplished or for a
season fraudster that does this often, that wouldn't be an issue.
I moved into someone's house one time, and I've done
this several times where they had a first mortgage, a
second mortgage, and they had a heelock. I satisfied all

(13:30):
three documents. I've moved in to someone's house, or least
someone's house and they had a first mortgage and a
second mortgage. I satisfied both those documents. I've had it
where they owed the irs money and they owed the
homeowners association money.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
I satisfied those documents.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
So satisfying leans on a property for someone who's willing
to forge the documents isn't an issue. So a lot
of people this is a common question. A lot of
people think, Hey, I own a house worth three hundred thousand.
I owe two hundred and ninety thousand on the house,
so I'm protected because I have no equity in my house.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
But the truth is.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
A title thief will simply make a document satisfying the
mortgages on your house, and now you have three hundred
thousand dollars worth of equity in your house. They can
then borrow against that or transfer the title and try
and sell the property or whatever their their goal is.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
Wow, all right, So what can ordinary people do to
try to prevent this from happening to us?

Speaker 2 (14:35):
I mean, you have to have your title monitor. You
have to have like, for example, home title lock. The reason,
one of the reasons obviously I push home title lock,
is that a lot of monitoring companies simply monitor your
title and they notify you that that something has occurred
in your title, but there's nobody to help you. There's

(14:55):
no advocate to explain to you what's happened. And the
great thing about home title lock is they'll one they'll
notify you. Once you say no, I did not do this,
they'll hire an attorney for you to correct it. So
they have a restoration service where they'll hire an attorney.
They'll act as an advocate for you to correct the damage.

(15:17):
A lot of people think if they find out that
their title has been stolen from them, they think if
I call the police, the police will fix it. The
police will not fix this. They will not fix the title.
They might catch the title thief and throw him in jail,
but if you're in foreclosure or your property has been
transferred to another person, the police won't do anything about it.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
So just to we're almost out of time here, but
just to follow up on that. So again, I think
I asked you this before, but I'm not sure I
understood the answer. So let's say this happens to me
and they catch the title thief, and the title thief
is in jail now and everybody knows I didn't take
out that that loan.

Speaker 4 (15:55):
Do I get my house back or not?

Speaker 2 (15:58):
You would have to hire an attorney and go through
the process, go through the court proceedings to get your
house back if you can afford an attorney. If you
can't afford one and you have home title lock, they'll
hire an attorney for you.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
It's an issue. It's a problem.

Speaker 4 (16:13):
How common is this fraud?

Speaker 2 (16:16):
I personally feel it. It's it's not only that it's common,
it's happening.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
More and more all the time.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Twenty years ago, you had to have a certain skill
set to pull this off. Now the average street guy
is doing it. I mean, you hear these crimes that
are happening. This is not a This woman almost got
away with Grace Land God knows what she's done that
she's never been caught for. Yeah, you don't have to
have you don't have to have high school diploma to
pull this off, right.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
And that's a property that some people say is worth
four hundred million dollars. I don't know the number, but
whatever the number is, it's a lot. And she and
she was almost able to seal it. Met Cox, he's
an advisor to Home Title Lock. You spent twelve years
in prison for doing this kind of stuff, so he
knows when talking about very very interesting conversation. Thank you
so much for spending time with us, and I love

(17:06):
the story about how you met your wife.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
Absolutely absolutely, thank you.

Speaker 4 (17:10):
All right, good to talk to you. Thank you, Matt,