Property Owners Caught in Scam that Games Lien Process

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Some Oakland County taxpayers are getting a surprise – and not a happy one – when they try to make good on their property tax debt.

The 50 some victims of a widespread real estate scam include Roderick Akins, a 49-year-old former Marine and single dad from Auburn Hills, who learned he no longer owned his home when he tried to pay some of his back taxes.

“I was trying to figure out how I did not own the property,” Akins told the Detroit Free Press. “There’s a lot of cases like this, not just me.”

Oakland County Treasurer Andy Meisner told the newspaper the scam, which games the lien process, amounts to theft from some of society’s most vulnerable.

“Our system of property rights in this country is a very basic underpinning of our society,” he said. “Senior citizens, people with disabilities, some of the more vulnerable are really, really at risk.”

Here’s how the works:

Scammers find properties far behind on tax payments and on the brink of foreclosure, then offer the properties for public auction. Even though they have no connection to the owner, the operators of the scam pay some of the past-due taxes to stop the foreclosure process, place a lien on the property, file the necessary paperwork to transfer the title, then try to sell it for a profit.

In many cases, they get by with it because the legal homeowner has either died, walked away from the mortgage or simply assumed the property would be lost in a public auction. Abandoned homes are a favorite target of the operators of the scam, because there’s no one around to complain.

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Akins, who said he had never been served with a foreclosure notice nor summoned to appear in court, was able to save the home where he lives with his 15-year-old daughter.

Other property owners, like Rick Sarate of Royal Oak, haven’t been as lucky. He has spent the last two years trying to untangle the mess since finding out a lien had been slapped on his parents’ house in Royal Oak and says he is “caught between a rock and a hard place.”

The scam has been around for years, but recently made a resurgence, Meisner said.

A similar scam operated in Wayne County about a decade ago, and a couple of cases have surfaced lately in Macomb County. But Oakland County is the furthest along in identifying the houses that have been targeted and the people behind it.

No one has been charged at this point.

» The Detroit Free Press has more.

Photo via Flickr