homes sold from underneath me by a name doppelganger in jail

[Courtney T.]

Man oh man, where to start. Dirty laundry headed your way...

Over a year ago I attempted to refi one of my properties that had significant equity in order to finally purchase a place of my own. My lender got back to my quickly, "do you have an LLC now?", me "not that I am aware of...". Turns out, I (me, myself) 'sold' not one, but TWO of my properties in the same county to someone else, an LLC. Except I didn't do that.

The house I wanted to buy fell through and I focused on figuring out how the heck this happened. We did some more digging and found everything MID-transaction. What are the odds! Funds hadn't been disbursed yet. I was able to get phone numbers of all involved and come to find out someone with my exact name pretended to be me and sell my houses 6 hours away from where they were located. He just so happened to be in jail for attempting to get a car in my name 3 months prior. There are mobile notaries that specialize in jail visits if you can believe it ( I never stop learning in this industry). After discovering who the main players were, and getting their individual stories, I find out that the representing agent was friends with my name doppelganger, whom I'll call 'Mr. C'. He reached out to a broker and real estate attorney duo (the LLC) and offered to sell them for about half of their worth. Mr. C was smart enough to use the automated system for my lender to request payoff statements (how he figured out the lender I will never know). Then this got weirder..

title and escrow had asked some key questions about the title being under a woman and having it transferred to a man because of a recent sex change operation Mr. C stated he had. Mr. C had also provided them with two SSNs (just in case one didn't work). He had a criminal record of stealing his families property and was presently in jail. His reason for selling my houses? "His family that he doesn't get along with live there and he wants them gone"

I'm just not sure how the agent, broker who purchased my homes, and title/escrow were all getting ready to close on this when there were so many red flags? Needless to say, Mr. C was transferred to the county where 'his' houses are and I am still working to get the transfer of title restored to my name without a glitch. 

There are so many things on the internet about title fraud, but none where everyone was caught red-handed and where the criminal had hardly any matching information me aside from our names. Interested to hear what the BP community thinks as I have scrubbed this site looking for a similar scenario to no avail.