False sales of property are 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. Other counties may have this service as well.
Here are instructions for setting up monitoring in Canadian County. Oklahoma County is likely very similar. The first step is to call the County Clerk’s office & ask to be assigned a user name and password if you don’t already have an account. For Canadian County that’s 405-295-6002 & ask for Land Records. Ask them to email you the two instruction sheets for setting up a notification system for your property. Next, prepare a list of legal descriptions and assign names to each separate property. Some examples would be Home, West Pasture, Darlington Road farm, Can.Co. Geary Ranch, etc. You’ll want to narrow the description down to cover only what you own in the section, e.g. NW/4 Sec __ Twp __N Range __W. Keep in mind there may be other owners in the same quarter, for example, and you will get notified of everything for that quarter. For town lots you only need to know the Subdivision, Lot and Block. Then go to Canadian County Clerk. Under Login enter User Name and Password. Then follow the instructions on the sheet “Public Access to Notification System for Canadian County Land Records” which you obtained from the County Clerk’s office. For #3, do NOT just search for/register by your name as there are ways people can file without using your name. Search for and register each piece of property by legal description. Under NOTIFY OF UPDATES you will NAME each piece of property so that the email alert will identify which property it’s about. The alert email you receive will include a link which should go straight to the filing on the land records website.
You can select whether to have the searches run daily, weekly or monthly. Because I thought I might get a lot of emails, I created a Gmail address for use only for this purpose. Then I created a Label (folder) in Gmail just for these Alerts and a filter to have that dedicated email address go directly to that folder instead of to my Inbox. Now I can check these emails at my convenience instead of having them clutter up my Inbox.
Monitoring the property where your home is located is probably the most important thing. For other properties, such as mineral rights, that are owned by more than one family member, with some coordination only one person would need to monitor the properties that are held in common.
The other sheet of instructions “Public Access to Land Records”, tells you how to look up what documents have been filed pertaining to your property. Number 6 gives a list of what the abbreviations mean.