On Jul 29, 2014, at 12:00 AM, RECMGMT-L automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Subject: Official Says 87,000 Deeds Were Taken Lawsuit Filed in Federal Court - The Missourian: Emissourian
> Date: July 28, 2014 at 9:38:13 AM EDT
>
>
> Official Says 87,000 Deeds Were Takenn Lawsuit Filed in Federal Court - The
> Missourian: Emissourian
>
> Franklin County Recorder of Deeds Sharon Birkman said a company allegedly
> has taken electronic copies of the county’s deed records, possibly to sell
> to a third party.
>
> “Our deeds are very valuable,” Birkman told The Missourian Thursday. “So
> they scrape and they sell them to different companies.”
NO! The Deeds are priceless!
>
> All that is known at this point is that the deeds were taken, Birkman said.
> It has not been proven that the deeds were sold, but Birkman asked why else
> would a company take them.
http://www.emissourian.com/official-says-deeds-were-takenn-lawsuit-filed-in-federal-court/article_d8be345c-ad1a-5e57-8461-501d97a21982.html
FIRELOCK has built hundreds of Town Hall Records and Deed Vaults and we always go to great lengths to give the Town Clerk not only the outer vault door lock but also an inner door with an un-pickable key lock so they can guard their collections. Does this Clerk really not understand the ramifications???
This is a huge invasion of privacy on these Deeds. It is truly a theft of intellectual property. The Town Clerk sells copies of Deeds, birth certificates, birth records to the "proper individual” involved. Even the Title company performing the Deed Search has to have an authorization from the lawyers in the land transfer to come in and request a copy of this information. The Town Clerk’s major responsibility is the protection of this collection. Town Clerk’s have worked so flawlessly for 300 years that this is just shocking.
This intellectual property loss will present a risk to these particular property owners in Missouri. Thieves have used this information to sell real estate that is in probate and the “cloud the title" in an unrepairable way. Peter has posted RAIN articles about grandchildren who upon coming to their deceased grandparents house to take possession after the Probate process only to find a family living in the house. They tried to evict the intruders but a bank and title company officiated the sale to these people based on fraudulent land deeds and title documents. Truly they had no right to the house! It was in this family for generations. But in this case; the Judge split the baby and said the family buying the house did so unknowingly as the bank and the title company thought the fraudulent Deeds were accurate. So the two parties each suffered half the loss. Each party was devastated. Franklin County, what will you do to protect your citizens and homeowners?
This Town should launch a law suit against this company and have a judge grant an injunction holding that company liable for future property loss, expenses and legal defense costs that will be associated with the loss of this information. This is a massive identity breach.
Town Clerks who have converted to electronic records really need to develop a strategy to protect this intellectual property. Currently there is no safe strategy that cannot be circumvented by sophisticated property theft professionals.
The exposure here is monumental. Town’s don’t charge $2.00 in most cases. In many jurisdictions the Town Clerk charges the Title Company $25.00 to $50.00 to allow an attorney or their aid to come into the vault and make a copy of this information and create the new Abstract. There are towns in New Jersey and New York and Connecticut that create tremendous amounts of revenue for the Town by handling these sales of real estate through their Deed Copy support. Hunterdon County built a great new archive center and it is financed by these deed copy fees.
The theft of this town’s intellectual property will deprive the town of hundreds of thousands of fees over the coming decades. If Franklin County and the legal community and the title companies all immediately work together, possibly they can avert this disaster. But there are so many scams that can be perpetuated that it is mind boggling. These fraudulent and fictional land sales could easily be a massive new way to launder drug money. It will be the landowners who will pay the loss to make their property interest whole again, if that can occur.
Identity Theft is merely a process of culling information from different sources. Simply removing Social Security numbers from these documents does not render them useless. In most cases, deeds do not include that information as it is not necessary to the transfer process.
These are huge losses in the records management community. This is the biggest threat to the Town Clerks that has ever occurred. How can you ever put Pandora back in the box. All of these Deeds will now need to be put on some sort of special Identity Theft watch similar to the watch for the theft of the Target Credit Card Information this last Christmas.
In my opinion, and I am not a lawyer, just a citizen; Franklin County and these two companies would seem to liable as they are each complicit in creating a massive Identity exposure. The courts should move to make anyone who makes use of this information guilty of theft to attempt to stop the flood of problems that will result. Here is where an immediate Subpoena and a request for the three entities to provide Datamaps of this information ands its location as Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and demand a shutting down of all the servers holding the information, and connections to the internet that could enable a hacker to enter the data bases and require this information to be copied offline to tape and stored in a government controlled secure archive. A specialist like Digital Trust who is a data mapping expert should be brought in to define the location of all digital assets and create an accurate data map for all entities to map exposures that have occurred as of the current time. This Town will be the one ultimately liable as they made a huge mistake in placing this private information on public display.
NAGARA representatives, this case that Peter mentions should be forwarded to every Town Clerk in America to make them aware of this new and unintended risk.
Whoever made the decisions that allowed these deeds and identity documents to be put in harms way may be held liable or criminally liable. As they say, ignorance is no defense in the law. Citizens may bring suit against the Selectman that allowed the access to the documents and the Deeds and private information that create a PII exposure. No one can claim that they were ignorant of the risk as these documents are always stored in vaults so everybody who enters a Town Hall, sees the vault and recognizes that what is inside is valuable; priceless, and is worthy of protection. In several states this loss of information security would be a felony. In New York State it is a felony to destroy certain classes of records. The authenticity of these Deeds could very well be destroyed.
It is ironic to see the difference in attitude from Towns, Cities and Counties in the Northeast where the Town Clerks treat their documents as precious records. Yet in some states the Clerks somehow fail to see the correlation between the document and the real estate value. The authentic document and the risk to Identity Theft. The birth certificate, the abstract, the land deed are basic elements of identity and the Town Clerks have a legal liability to protect that information.
In New York State it was a felony to enter a Deed Vault with a pencil with an eraser. Notations to the deed changes were made with a pencil and only one true copy existed. Access to the original was the defense protocol. Copies used to be punched with holes to render a copy clearly not an original or they were stamped with big black rubber stamps of indelible ink. What care Town Clerks used. Iron clad protocols to protect the citizens’ records.
These companies who copied the deeds into electronic format should be required to notify every Title Company in America of this potential threat; and, be required to pay the cost of a special title search whenever any of these properties enters into a potential sale to be sure that the true landowner is making the sale. Every buyer of these 87,000 pieces of real estate should be aware that they could be handling an electronically created fraudulent document.
To all the Town Clerks in America that have protected the landowners interests for the last 370 years or so; I salute you. You are the longest serving Information Governance Officers in our country. No one can claim to do it longer or with more integrity than Town Clerks.
NAGARA should use this as a Case Study in your upcoming meeting in DC in August.
Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
[log in to unmask]
(610) 756-4440 Fax (610) 756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM
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