We all have busy, crazy lives. Between work, family, and taking kids to activities, volunteering – let alone time spent on social media - we are so busy, and we don’t always have time to make sure every detail is in order. This is particularly true in busy broker and legal offices where multiple deals are closing at any given time and clients are coming in to sign documents and pick up keys. Most real estate professionals (especially in the summer volume business) go home bleary-eyed and exhausted. Is this the time to be thinking – Did I check that person’s ID properly? Am I sure that he/she/they are who they said they are? No one needs that kind of stress, especially when you get to do the same crazy amount of work tomorrow on the next set of deals. 

While we may love the action-packed pace, we can’t be on top of every detail, every day of every minute. It is, therefore, essential to build processes or at least take time on the critical issues to make sure you and your clients are protected as best as possible. Title insurance is one of the ways to protect against issues like Fraud and Forgery. It has been a game-changer for law firms allowing them to streamline processes and better protect their clients, especially against fraud. Title insurance, together with our Transaction Protection Endorsement (TPE), gives the best protection to your clients. As part of that package, we do protect against a variety of fraud and forgery instances. We cover identity and title fraud, but we do not cover financial fraud (inflating values, falsified employment or net worth documents). 

Even when identity theft is covered, you do not want your client involved in a fraudulent situation that will result in needing to prove that they were properly vetted and that they weren’t willfully blind to the fraud. And you don’t want to be trying to explain to the client how this happened, how the fraudsters could possibly have tricked you. We can do something to help on that front as well. We know that 99.9% of clients/borrowers are legitimate, but we also know that fraudsters are out there, and they are highly skilled. But how do you find the 1 or 2 bad apples in the whole basket? We have heard of or been involved in situations where fraudsters got access to properties to show them to lenders, pretended to be a spouse of someone; we are even aware of a mother and son defrauding their own son/brother by stealing his identity – several times (Thanks Mom/Bro!). 

So, to protect ourselves on the risk we are covering and to protect you and your clients from this risk, we have introduced the ID Verification Service. For only $25, we can facilitate a confidential Equifax questionnaire that asks the borrower 5 questions about things such as where they have lived in the last 10 years. One of the law firms has requested us to use this service for every deal, at least on the private loan borrowers. This is an ideal practice for all your deals, or at least on those deals that you are suspicious about, where you just don’t know the parties well, or it is the first time that you are dealing with them. All you do is have the borrower/purchaser call our office, we run the test and get a pass or fail response. If they pass, the likelihood that the party is a fraudster is incredibly low. So, do you want to take that risk on a day you are trying to get 5 deals closed, and you have to take your kid to hockey practice or do you want to spend $25 and rest assured that you are not being duped into a fraud scenario? I don’t know about you, but it seems like the best $25 I could spend on my real estate transaction.