Across New York, officials have admitted to a growing problem, one that has communities increasingly alarmed: deed theft.
It is fraud that has affected older adults, immigrants, and homeowners of color in gentrifying neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Brownsville, East New York, and Harlem, and has become blatant. Victims report being initially confused and later incensed at the realization that they’ve been harmed –– and no one seems to be doing anything about it.
Deed theft happens when someone illegally takes control of a property without the owner’s knowledge or by tricking the owner into signing over a deed. Activists fighting these incidents also say that forced guardianship, foreclosure rescue scams, and police-backed evictions are other forms of deed theft.
Criminal fraud rings know how to manipulate the official systems homeowners trust to reach their next victims. Predatory investors track court records and property filings to target at-risk homes. Before the property gets auctioned, criminals might contact the homeowners and pretend to help them get a fake loan modification or a short sale and trick them into signing papers that transfer the deed to an investor’s LLC. They then quickly transfer the deed to another shell company to hide the fraud and make selling the property easier for quick profit.
But each stolen deed case amounts to a raid on Black generational wealth, notes Attorney Jacqueline McMickens, who recently helped the family of Harlem’s Queen Mother Delois Blakely with her eviction case at 477 West 142nd Street. McMickens says the term “deed theft” doesn’t fully capture the economic harm caused by these cases. “This shouldn’t be continuously looked at as deed theft,” McMickens said. “This is really equity theft.”
In the Blakely case, seven low-income residents came together to form the 477 West 142nd Street Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) through New York City’s Tenant Interim Lease program. Blakely recently told the AmNews the building had been a safe space, created during Harlem’s roughest years. “No one wanted to live there. It was a blight to Harlem where I live,” she said, remembering the 1970s. “Some of us wanted to deal with that and serve our people. And I happened to be one of them.”
The city officially sold the cooperative the property on Dec. 7, 1982; each family acquired shares in the building for $250 per apartment. But because the shareholders took out a $650,000 mortgage on the property in 2009 and didn’t repay it, they lost the property. They are now being offered leases to remain in their individual units but won’t have access to the property’s equity to pass on to their families.
An insidious way to steal
Stolen property may immediately mean the loss of a shelter for a family, but it also ultimately means the loss of equity, or financial value, for generations to come.
The New York City Sheriff’s Office said it received nearly 3,500 deed theft complaints from 2014 to 2023, mostly in Black neighborhoods where property values are rising. Notable recent cases include a mortgage fraud scheme that took the Harlem property at 267 West 131st Street from the family of Okryun Marrero after she died in 2018.
On April 18, 2024, a woman named Angela Jazmin Ramos Malpica allegedly posed as a Marrero heir and used fake IDs and birth certificates to forge the signatures and details of Marrero’s real heirs and “sell” the property to a straw buyer, Yuan Kuei Li, for $950,000. The same day, Li allegedly transferred the contract to Abdur Rahman and his company, Great Neck Acquisitions Inc., for $1,515,000. On April 25, 2024, Great Neck Acquisitions recorded a fraudulent title with the city and used the house as collateral to secure a $1,636,000 mortgage and construction loan.
“Ramos subsequently cashed three checks totaling $254,875.03, which were funds obtained from the mortgage and construction loan,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr. announced when his office indicted Ramos, Rahman and Li for deed theft in October 2025. “Rahman allegedly received $487,375 from the construction loan into a GNA bank account, which he controlled. Rahman also sent approximately $265,000 of the fraudulently obtained loan proceeds to a corporate bank account for MSK Construction Team Inc., a construction company controlled by Li. Li, through MSK, allegedly used portions of that money to pay for ongoing construction on the alleged stolen property, for which Li was serving as the contractor.”
In July, Attorney General Letitia James charged Joseph Makhani from Long Island with using fake deeds and shell companies to steal two Harlem homes at 107 West 118th Street and 135 West 131st Street. Makhani had claimed he bought the three-story, four-unit property at West 118th Street from Veronica Palmer, an elderly Harlem property owner who was having mental health issues, for only $10, according to court documents. James alleges he wrote up fake documents to get a loan and converted the building into apartments that he rented out for thousands of dollars. Palmer got none of the money, became homeless, and was later found living in a Brownsville, Brooklyn shelter, collecting cans from the street to survive.
After the original owner of 135 West 131st Street died in 2010, Makhani allegedly convinced a tenant to sign documents and act as if he owned the Harlem brownstone. Makhani had promised the tenant a job, but instead ended up trying to evict the building’s long-term tenants — filing false documents to transfer the property to a shell company and lodging a 2013 lawsuit to evict them from 135 West 131st Street, according to James. While trying to evict the tenants, Makhani submitted forged deeds claiming that the true owner’s heirs had transferred the property to his company, and that’s where he got caught. Combined, the value of the two properties stolen by Makhani was approximately $4.7 million. With sentencing scheduled for this October 14, Makhani faces a maximum penalty of 8⅓ to 25 years in prison.
In 2023 and 2024, New York passed legislation to make it easier to prosecute deed theft and prevent homes from being resold after theft. The Civil Protections Law, passed in November 2023, authorizes the Attorney General and local District Attorneys to file notices on properties suspected of deed theft, helping prevent scammers from selling the homes or taking out loans on them. The law allows courts to freeze foreclosure, eviction, or title proceedings when a homeowner shows reasonable proof of victimization, so it shields legitimate owners from being ousted by fraudsters. It also helps void any fraudulent transfer, sale, or mortgages, restoring title to the rightful owner. But these laws focus on prosecuting criminals and returning titles, rather than automatically canceling quick resales.
What makes a property high-risk?
Deed theft criminals comb through public records looking for owners who look like they could be susceptible to isolation and coercion. By tapping into public city data, they can spot homes that are at risk because of tax and property liens. The Department of Finance says a tax lien sale does not sell the property itself; the city sells unpaid debt to an authorized buyer, which can be a first step toward foreclosure. Scammers and speculators use this time, when homeowners are in distress — before the lien sale — to make their move.
“We should be looking at the banks,” Attorney McMickens said. “These are all loans that people don’t pay back. The banks are strategically allowing them to go into foreclosure.” In her view, the transfer of wealth happens through compounding debt as much as through forged papers: “They’re not stealing your deed, they’re stealing the equity in your house.”
In Brooklyn, the Sanford Solny case has become a notorious example of how this plays out. Prosecutors said Solny, a disbarred attorney, targeted homeowners facing foreclosure, promised short-sale help, but instead transferred deeds to himself or companies he controlled. “This defendant didn’t just steal homes,” Brooklyn’s District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said when Solny was convicted, “he stole stability, equity, and the future that these families worked hard to build. He preyed on Brooklyn homeowners already in crisis, including a nurse, cab driver, and home health aide, by posing as a trusted advisor.” In June 2025, he was convicted of stealing the deeds to 11 Brooklyn properties, primarily from homeowners in financial distress; in November, he was sentenced to two and a half to seven years in prison. The Brooklyn DA said the scheme ran from 2012 to 2022 and involved 15 victims. The court nullified the fraudulent deeds, but victims still face the brutal work of repairing their credit and –– if possible –– recovering their home.
Gaoussou Ouedraogo and Patrice and Clotilde “Wendy” Sawadogo lost two Brooklyn properties to Solny’s schemes. Their home at 406 East 21st Street was sold for about $1 million even though, according to their attorneys and advocates, it was under a court-ordered legal hold. Their property at 729 Eldert Lane was also part of the case. “We are still going to court to gain the ownership of both properties,” Ouedraogo recently told the Amsterdam News. “So far, we are on the calendar schedule of the foreclosure court on the 13th of October 2026 for 729 Eldert Lane, and we are still fighting to bring the lawsuit against the foreclosure of the mortgage bank that foreclosed on it.
“We need prayers from everyone of you for us to win our cases,” he added.
When Mayor Zohran Mamdani established the Office of Deed Theft Prevention (MODTP) in April 2026, it was funded with $500,000 for its first year, which ends in summer 2026, and $1 million each year after that. It’s not clear how many staff members are employed there, but most of the money seems intended for staff salaries.
In a Sept. 11 statement, a Department of Finance (DOF) spokesperson told the AmNews: “The City Register’s Office takes proactive steps to help prevent deed theft. Staff have been trained to better detect documents that may be forged or fraudulent, and the office has put in place several safeguards to flag suspicious deeds, referring potentially fraudulent filings to the Sheriff’s Office for further investigation. The Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention also works closely with the City Register’s Office, and has requested several holds on suspicious deed transfers while the Sheriff’s Office conducts further investigation.
“While the City Register has explored ways to identify seniors and other vulnerable populations in the deed-recording process, doing so would raise HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] and other privacy concerns and could potentially require access to sensitive personal information that the City Register is not authorized to collect or use for this purpose.
“We are continually evaluating our policies and legal tools to identify additional safeguards that could strengthen protections against deed theft while respecting privacy requirements and the City Register’s authority under State law.”
In the end, New York City’s ACRIS, the online database for real estate records, can list deeds, mortgages, or liens, but the DOF states that there is currently no effective way for it to notify users when a property’s ownership is being legally disputed. While this remains the case, Black property owners will have to shoulder the burden of challenging fraudulent claims by demonstrating when public records have been tampered with.
Part Two of this series looks at how court-approved “partition sales” can allow predatory LLCs to target heirs. Predatory LLCs use legal pressure and repeated filings to push families to sell homes that have been passed down for generations.
Editor’s Note: This story was made possible with help from a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
