An Arizona man planned to build his retirement home on a plot of land he bought 20 years ago. The problem: It was sold for $200,000 without him knowing.

• William Gordon bought a lot in Tucson, Arizona, in 1999 with plans to build his retirement home on it.
• In March 2023, the lot was sold for $200,000 by someone who Gordon said impersonated him.

In March 2023, William Gordon received a letter in the mail from his title company congratulating him on the $200,000 sale of his Tucson, Arizona, property. The catch: He hadn't listed it for sale.

Gordon noticed almost immediately that the congratulatory letter was off.

"I noticed the last four digits of the social security number were not mine and the address was wrong — the mail shouldn't have even gotten to me," Gordon told Insider.

Gordon, 65, bought the undeveloped, 3 1/3-acre property in 1999 for $76,500, Pima County property records show. He's been paying regular mortgage payments on the land and had around $9,000 left to pay on the loan, he said.

Gordon is one of many property owners that have been on the receiving end of real-estate-related fraud. In 2022, 11,578 people in the US reported losing a total of $350,328,166 from real-estate scams, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center — a 64% increase from 2021.

Home title theft — a crime where someone steals a homeowner's identity to take ownership of a property — leaves property owners, like Gordon, without many options for quick reconciliation. And it's been happening with greater regularity in recent years. In Gordon's case, he was pulled in many directions over countless phone calls, and had a hard time getting a straight answer on how to move forward.

"The county said, all you have to do is just undo this," he said. "But nobody seemed to know how to undo this."

A breakdown in responsibility

Gordon noticed a number of red flags in the congratulatory letter he received from the title company that he said they should have noticed, too.

"There were several really odd things that had been ignored," he said. "The notary that they used was five-and-a-half hours away in an entirely different county from where the documents were signed."

Gordon lives in Phoenix, but the warranty deed recorded by the county — which was reviewed by Insider — had "Arizona" and "Pima" crossed out and replaced by "Texas" and "Bexar," a county almost 900 miles from Tucson.

"I was not in Texas," Gordon said. "I could prove that I was in Arizona at the time that the paperwork was signed by a notary in Texas."

It's unclear who impersonated Gordon, but the notary stamp gave the name of "Penny Davis" of Texas.

Gordon spoke with Title Security Agency, the Arizona company that handled Gordon's title work when he purchased the property in 1999. (Note: The current entity came under new ownership in 2020 after being acquired by First American Financial.) Gordon said they quickly realized someone was impersonating him. They directed him to his county recorder, whose job it is to record and index documents for the area.

The Pima Recorder's Office told Gordon that they record documents, not verify them, he said, and sent him back to the title company.

Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly told Insider that she wasn't sure why the title company referred Gordon to her, saying the recorder's office is essentially a library.

"We rely on title companies, on notaries — which is why they are required to have insurance — because it is ultimately up to those companies to have the safeguards to ensure that they're dealing with the correct property," she said.

Notaries and real-estate agents usually confirm the identity of the parties involved in a transaction while title companies confirm ownership of the land, but according to Gordon, none of that happened before his land was sold. He was miffed that a document as crucial as a deed would not have a rigorous verification process for identification, he said. Title Security Agency did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment.

"I can't go and cash a check in a bank for $20 without two forms of identification," Gordon said. "And you're doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial transactions, and you have zero processes or feel any responsibility to confirm identities?"

Brokerages are trying to stop fraud before it's too late

Real-estate agents in Arizona have seen a rise in fraud this year — especially for vacant land.

"In the last three or four months we've seen a huge uptick, and it caught everybody by surprise," Eric Gibbs, the designated broker for Realty ONE Group Integrity, said to Insider about title fraud. "I'm not saying it never happened before, but not like this."

Gibbs didn't represent the buyer in Gordon's case, but his brokerage did. He told Insider that in this instance, the seller was found out to be fraudulent soon after the deal closed. Cases like these, Gibbs said, are getting harder to sniff out. He told Insider he spoke with a broker that had four fraudulent incidents in one day. But Gibbs has instituted measures within his own firm — like asking for copies of photo IDs and having Zoom meetings with clients — to minimize fraud in vacant-land sales.

"We have a situation going on, not only here but other places, where deed fraud is on the rise," he said. "We're trying to get a handle on how we can minimize the risk, because the people that are doing the fraud have gotten very, very good."

Jeff Murtaugh — the CEO and designated broker for Realty Executives Arizona Territory, which brokered the sale of Gordon's property — says he's adopted a new procedure after seeing what Gordon went through. He now sends a letter to the property that must be signed by the seller and returned, in order to confirm their identity. But, he said, the question of who the responsibility to catch fraud falls to is still hazy.

"The question is, who's got the liability," Murtaugh told Insider. "Is it the title company? Is it the agents? I don't think anybody knows that yet."

Gordon got his land back, but not without a cost

Gordon hired a legal team — that he has since dismissed — in an attempt to get his land back at a cost of around $9,000. He ultimately got his property back, but it wasn't easy.

After the buyers were refunded their $200,000 from Old Republic Title Insurance, the title insurance company they used in the transaction, they signed a quitclaim deed which relinquished the right to ownership of Gordon's property and granted the county the ability to transfer the title back into Gordon's name.

It sounds easy enough, but Gordon said he ran into a predicament with the title insurance company.

Old Republic Title Insurance paid off Gordon's remaining mortgage balance and property taxes during the sales process and demanded he pay them back $11,000, Gordon said.

Gordon ended up taking money out of his retirement account to pay Old Republic off, he said.

Old Republic, which also goes by the abbreviation ORNTIC, could not be reached for comment, however the company did email a statement to Gordon's former legal team, which was first reported by News 4 Tucson in July:

"ORNTIC has no contractual relationship with Mr. Gordon and declines to issue a title policy to Mr. Gordon. ORNTIC furthermore owes no duty of care to Mr. Gordon as ORNTIC was neither the escrow nor the title company handling this transaction. I understand that you allege that the escrow company failed to exercise due diligence, but that company is completely unrelated to ORNTIC."

He was disturbed that this happened to him, but, he said, more upset with how little the title companies did to help him.

"They could have filed some paperwork with the county, reversed it, and all of this would've been fine," he said. "But instead they made my life a living nightmare and then said, 'Well it's not our responsibility.'"