Jennifer 🇺🇸

Somebody almost sold Graceland out from under the Presley family. A real foreclosure auction, publicly noticed, 13 acres in Memphis. A woman in Missouri named Lisa Jeanine Findley invented a lender. Naussany Investments and Private Lending. It didn't exist. Then she invented a loan. Claimed Lisa Marie Presley borrowed $3.8 million against Graceland in 2018 and died in 2023 without paying it back. She forged Lisa Marie's signature. She forged a Florida notary's stamp. That notary said in Riley Keough's lawsuit she'd never met Lisa Marie Presley and never notarized a thing for her. Then she did the part that should get your attention. She filed a fake deed of trust with the Shelby County Register's Office. And it was recorded. She posed as three different people, demanded $2.85 million from the family to make it go away, and when they didn't pay, scheduled the auction for May 2024. Riley Keough sued. A judge blocked the sale. Findley's response was to claim the real criminal was a Nigerian identity thief who had stolen her identity. She pleaded guilty to mail fraud. 57 months in federal prison. Here's why it got that far. County recorders are required to accept documents that meet basic formatting rules. They don't verify that a signature is real. A forged deed can sit in the public record for years before anyone notices. This scare gets marketed hard. It's rare. FBI data shows 9,359 real estate fraud complaints and $173.6 million in losses across all categories, and title theft is only a piece of that. And the companies selling you protection have every reason to make it sound worse. But the risk isn't spread evenly, and retirees sit right in the target. Criminals go after property nobody is watching. Vacant land, vacation homes, rentals, inherited houses, and anything owned free and clear, because no mortgage means no lender watching the title. ALTA found 85% of seller impersonation fraud targets vacant land. The Realtors found only 12% of cases involved owner-occupied homes. Four things to do: Sign up for property fraud alerts at your county recorder. Many counties offer it free and it emails you when anything gets recorded against your name. The FBI recommends exactly this, and it's most of what the paid services sell. Pull your own deed once a year. Most counties have it searchable online. Watch the mail at the empty property. Mail that stops, a bill from a lender you don't recognize, a tax notice going somewhere else. Those aren't clerical errors. Read your title policy. Some cover forgery after purchase. Many don't. Find out which one you have before you need to know. If it happens, you're filing a quiet title action to get your own house back. Uncontested runs $1,500 to $5,000. Contested runs a lot more. They almost took Graceland with a forged signature and a company that didn't exist.