False sales of property are become a serious problem all over the United States. In Canadian and Oklahoma Counties in Oklahoma, County Clerks are providing a FREE service whereby a person can be notified by email if someone tries to fraudulently file on real property (surface and/or minerals) they own in the county, e.g. deeds and mortgages. A bad actor might forge a person’s signature, but there are also ways they can file without even using an owner’s name. The quicker the fraud is discovered, the better the chance of fighting it. For Canadian and Oklahoma counties I have posted instructions on how to set up monitoring under the Canadian County category. The two processes are similar. To find out if this service is available in counties where you own minerals and/or other real property, contact the County Clerk’s office in that county.
Most counties in Texas offer this service. You sign up on the county clerk’s website.
Good to know. Thanks.
You can also use OkCountyRecords.com and create an alert for a specific name, which could also help with things like this, and they cover a lot of counties.
I have an account on that site, but I don’t see anywhere to set up alerts. What should I look for?
I have serious doubts that a County Clerk will be able to perform this service on a mineral estate since they are not required to maintain a record of the current owner. With that said, you may be able to monitor if a document is filed in some counties by using various data services.
The surface estate is a different issue since the tax office maintains a record of the current owner.
The point is they don’t have to know who the owner is to send an alert. In Oklahoma and probably most other states, mineral deeds, leases, assignments of leases, warranty deeds, quit claim mineral deeds, etc., all affect ownership of minerals and are filed with county clerks. Non-owners can falsely file against a property and the owner would not know it unless he is checking the county records regularly. If someone sets up to receive an alert from the county clerk’s office for a chosen legal description and/or their name, any filing that meets those criteria triggers an email to be sent to the email address they have set up with them. It’s computerized so no one in the clerk’s office has to do anything. It’s automatic. It’s a service offered by my county clerk’s offce and others.
This is a data crawl process from what I can tell on the published info for Canadian County with an email notification. Some info indicates it is free to residents of Canadian County. I cannot find information regarding any cost if you are not a resident. There is nothing hurt by being a part of the program.
If there is a cost, then most OK mineral owners might be better served by regularly searching OKCountyRecords.com and OCC websites. I can see the novelty, but the Canadian Clerk said they have not experienced issues of fraud.