A North Carolina man claims that a woman he has never met before filed legal documents claiming ownership of his $4 million home and managed to obtain the deed to his property.
Raleigh dentist Dr. Craig Adams recently learned that the 8,300-square-foot home he has been living in for years is no longer in his name. Instead, it shows up in the name of a total stranger who allegedly filed “a false warranty claim deed against the house and basically tried to steal it.” Adams only learned that he apparently didn’t own his property anymore after a neighbor called to ask him if he had sold it and informed him that a woman named Dawn Mangum had asked for the gate access codes. Shockingly, the owner also presented what appeared to be a legal deed in her name. To Adams’ surprise, the deed had indeed been legally obtained from the Register of Deeds and could not be revoked.
“They say there’s absolutely nothing they can do to reverse this,” Dr. Adams told local reporters. “Once it’s filed their only solution is that I have to go hire a private attorney, and the first quote I got was about $8,000 to file a civil suit against this woman.”
The North Carolina dentist suspects that Mangum’s intention was to squat in the house and use the deed to slow down the eviction process, but the woman told ABC 7 Chicago that she only filed paperwork for the deed because she thought it had been abandoned and the law states that one can claim foreclosed properties. Furthermore, she insists that she wants to return the ownership to Adams, but the law doesn’t allow it. The Register said they can’t remove a document once it has been recorded.
What the rightful property owner finds most frustrating about the whole situation is that the local Register of Deeds didn’t bother running the simplest check before issuing a deed for a $4 million property to a complete stranger. He says that his case should be a warning to all North Carolina citizens “because anyone can go downtown and make a false claim for someone else’s property.”
“There was no inquiry about who owns the property. If there had been just this one simple check, my name would have popped up,” Adams said. “There is no accountability measures … none.”
However, the North Carolina Register of Deeds takes no responsibility for the situation, claiming that according to state law, its staff is under no obligation to verify the legal sufficiency of a deed when it is presented for registration or the capacity of the drafter. It can refuse to record a document if fraud is suspected, but there was apparently no such suspicion in this case.
A couple of days ago, the Wake County Sheriff’s Department detained Dawn Mangum of Louisburg after she was charged with knowingly filing a fraudulent deed against Adams’ $4 million property.
