Reader,
I built something new, and before I tell the wider world about it, I want you to try it first.
It is called Georgia Property Fraud Watch, and the link to it is cherylking.me/fraud-watch. It is free. It takes about ten minutes to build your plan — completing the registrations it points you to takes longer — and you leave with a personal, printable plan for watching a Georgia property for fraudulent filings.
Why I built it
Here is one story I have heard recently, one of many. It is the reason this tool exists. I read it in a private Facebook group and spent the rest of the day building something to help.
A buyer closed on a house. Three days later, he found lockboxes on his door that he had never authorized. A stranger had already let himself in with the help of an innocent workman doing some pre-possession repairs. He claimed to be there at the owner's request, and photographed the inside. The rental company that owned the lockbox was slow to respond. Then a rental ad for the house appeared briefly online — and disappeared. The buyer ended up removing and replacing the doorknob and rekeying his locks at his own expense, still without answers about who had been inside his home or what happened to the photos.
That is not a deed-fraud story. It is a lockbox story. But the lesson is the same: someone can move on a house that is not theirs fast.
Deed fraud is the version where the paperwork itself gets forged. A fraudster files a forged deed, sometimes sells the property to an unsuspecting buyer, and the real owner finds out months later — from a tax bill that stopped coming, a "for sale" sign they did not put up, or a stranger claiming to own their land.
The numbers back that up. In ALTA's 2026 seller impersonation study, 59% of title firms said they had encountered at least one seller-impersonation attempt in 2025, up from 28% in 2024. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported $275.1 million in real estate fraud losses across 12,368 complaints for 2025.
Vacant land is a frequent target, because no one lives there to notice. So is property still in a deceased person's name, because no one is watching the mailbox. And older owners get targeted because a fraudster counts on them not checking the records. But fraudulent sales and leases can happen to anyone at any age with any type of property.
There is a free Georgia service that helps, and most property owners have never heard of it.
What the tool does
The tool walks you through four steps and produces a plan tailored to the property you enter.
Step 1: Register with FANS. FANS is the Filing Activity Notification System, run by the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority. It is free. You register a name with an email address or mobile number, confirm with a one-time code — there is no password to create — and it notifies you when a filing is indexed under that name in any of Georgia's 159 counties.
FANS offers three kinds of notification, and you may register all three. None of them covers everything, and the tool says so plainly:
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Name. Register each human name as indexed. FANS matches first names by starts-with and last names exactly as entered, so the tool generates the variations — including the double-last-name problem I run into myself, where some records treat my middle name as part of a double last name. Name notifications only cover human names; company, entity, and trust names are not covered on their own.
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Address. Add the property address to watch filings whose transfer-tax or UCC data matches it. That matching uses only that data, so it is not universal.
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Document reference. Add a notification for a specific recorded deed, using the county, book, and page from the deed sent after closing and recording.
The tool handles the tricky ownership cases: trusts (register the trustees' names when they appear on the deed), estates (register both the personal representative and the decedent), and LLCs, corporations, and other entities (register your own name too — FANS requires a name registration — and let the address and document notifications do the catching).
Step 2: Set Google Alerts. FANS watches court filings. Google Alerts watch the web — listings, ads, and pages using the property address — which is where a fraudster often shops a property first. The tool generates the variation of names and phrases to use for the search.
Step 3: Your annual habit. FANS requests expire after one year unless you renew them by logging in, so the tool sets a calendar reminder eleven months out — before they expire — and gives you a yearly checklist: re-check the deed records, confirm the tax-bill mailing address, confirm the alerts are still running, check the owner's title insurance for post-policy forgery coverage, and freeze credit.
Step 4, Understand the baseline. FANS only watches new filings. If you have owned a property for a while, or you think there may be an issue, the tool tells you to ask a Georgia real estate closing office whether, and at what cost, they can run a title exam. If you are buying, your closing exam already is the baseline.
Along the way, the tool covers warning signs (mail stopping, unfamiliar loan or lien notices, unsolicited offers, a listing you did not create), a power-of-attorney caution (never sign a blank one; revoke old ones in writing), and a note on paid title locking, monitoring, and defense plans: you cannot literally lock a title, and some plans promise restoration or legal assistance, but I could not independently verify an example of one paying legal costs to defend a customer's title. Before paying for one, check the owner's policy from the purchase — enhanced policies often include post-policy forgery protection, and the monitoring itself is free through FANS.
If you get an alert, the tool tells you what to do, in order: check whether you authorized it, get the recorded document, preserve everything, and contact a Georgia real estate attorney promptly.
What the tool does not do
The tool does not register FANS for you, does not create Google Alerts for you, does not search deed records, and does not monitor anything. Those steps need your own accounts, and you do them yourself from the plan it generates.
Nothing you type into the tool is sent to me or stored by me. It stays in your browser on your device, and the printed or downloaded plan is the copy that lasts. (Two fine-print items: the page itself is measured by Google Analytics, which counts visits but receives nothing you type, and the Google Calendar reminder link sends the plan details to Google — the calendar file download stays on your device.)
Who it is for
Any Georgia property owner — and that includes you. Run it on your own property first. Then pass it to the clients who need it most: the vacant-land owner, the family that inherited property and has not retitled it yet, the older owner who does not check records. An agent can prepare a plan for someone else, but the owner — or a person they have authorized — has to make the FANS requests themselves.
Will you test it for me?
Here is what I need from you: Before I promote this more widely, I want real people running through it and telling me what they find. If you are finding this on my blog, thanks for reading and subscribe if you want articles to come straight to your inbox.
Go to cherylking.me/fraud-watch and build a plan for a property you own, or run through it as a test. Then just reply to this email and tell me:
- What confused you, if anything?
- What was missing?
- Did anything break — on your phone, on your computer, in the printed plan?
- Did the finished plan make sense when you read it back?
If a step tripped you up, it will trip up a homeowner too. Tell me now. I expect questions and issues. I want to hear all of them.
I will be in NAR Verified Instructor training Tuesday and Wednesday, so I may not reply right away.
Thank you for trying it. This is general educational information about watching for Georgia real estate fraud — not legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. But early warning is the whole point: the sooner a suspicious filing is spotted, the sooner something can be done about it.
Stay Smart,
Cheryl Conner King
Founder & Instructor
REALsmart Real Estate School
Attorney | REALTOR® | CE Instructor
📍 Based in Georgia | Teaching Statewide
