A woman with a $2.9M house in New York lived in a homeless shelter while a stranger collected $12,000/month renting it out He'd stolen it using fake paperwork. Then convinced a bank to give him a $1.2 million loan using HER house as collateral. He got away with collecting rent for 7 years while the owner lived in a shelter. If you own a house, you could end up in the same situation heres how to make sure this never happens to you: In 2012, Joseph Makhani used fraudulent deeds and companies he controlled to take over an elderly woman's brownstone in Harlem. One of his companies filed a document claiming it bought her house for $10. Then he went to a lender and claimed he'd paid $975,000 for it. The lender gave him a $650,000 construction loan. He eventually refinanced that into a $1.2 million mortgage, converted the building into apartments, and started renting them out. For 7 years, he collected more than $12,000 every month. The actual owner was living in a homeless shelter. In July 2026, a New York jury found Makhani guilty of possessing stolen property and a scheme to defraud. Now think about what had to happen for any of this to work. When somebody buys a house, a deed gets recorded with the local government. That public record is how lenders, buyers, and title companies check who owns a property. You'd assume the government verifies that the sale happened before recording the deed. It doesn't necessarily work that way. New York City's Department of Finance says it's required to record documents that meet its filing requirements. Even if those documents are later found to be fraudulent. Recording a fake deed doesn't make the thief the legal owner. But it can give them paperwork convincing enough to fool lenders, tenants, and other people dealing with the property. Which explains how somebody can end up borrowing over a million dollars against a house they never legally bought. And why the real owner might not discover what's happening until years later. New York City has a free service specifically designed to help homeowners catch suspicious filings. It's called Recorded Document Notification. You register your property, and the city emails you when someone records a deed, mortgage, or certain related documents against it. Usually the following day. If you own property in NYC, go to (nyc.)gov/acris and select "Recorded Document Notification." Register your property address and email. That's it. Some counties outside New York offer similar free alerts through their recorder's office. The FBI even recommends signing up for them where they're available. There's one other thing I'd check before registering. Look at the deeds and mortgages already recorded against your house. Make sure you recognize them. Because an alert you sign up for today won't necessarily tell you about a fraudulent deed somebody filed 3 years ago. And if you find a document you never authorized, get a copy and report the suspected fraud to your county recorder and law enforcement. A real estate attorney can help you challenge it. These alerts won't prevent somebody from filing fake paperwork. They give you a chance to discover it before the situation gets worse. And considering what happened to this woman, I'd rather spend a few minutes checking my property records than discover years later that somebody has been collecting rent from a house I own.