How Data Brokers Expose Property Owners to Fraud Targeting
County assessor records and people-search sites turn property owners into fraud targets. What is public, what you can opt out of, and what no opt-out fixes.
Mo Ayadi
Founder, Title Barrier | Property Fraud Prevention
By Mo Ayadi, Founder of Title Barrier | Published September 10, 2026
If you own real estate, your name, the property address, the assessed value, and usually the mailing address where your tax bill goes are public. The county assessor publishes them because state law requires it. Data brokers copy that data, merge it with your phone number, email, age, and relatives from other sources, and sell the result as a people-search profile. That profile is how a scammer learns that the owner of a vacant lot in Arizona is 78 years old and lives in Michigan.
Targeting is the first step in almost every property fraud, and it runs on public records. The 2025 NAR Deed and Title Fraud Survey found that 62% of title fraud cases involved vacant land and only 12% involved owner-occupied homes. Vacant land gets hit because it is easy to identify an owner who is not around to notice, and that identification is done with assessor data and broker profiles, not with hacking.
This article covers what the county actually publishes, what brokers add to it, which pieces you can remove, and which you cannot. There is no setting that makes a property owner invisible. There are steps that shrink the profile, and there are steps that make the profile less useful to a criminal even if it stays online.
Disclosure: I run Title Barrier, a property fraud prevention company. I have a commercial interest in this topic. Factual claims are sourced so you can check them.
What the county publishes about you
Two county offices matter here: the assessor (called the appraiser in some states) and the recorder (also called the register of deeds or county clerk). I wrote about the split in County Recorder vs. Assessor vs. Clerk, but the short version is that the assessor tracks value for tax purposes and the recorder keeps the permanent chain of title.
The assessor's parcel record typically shows the parcel number, the situs address, the owner's name, the mailing address for the tax bill, the assessed value split between land and improvements, whether a homestead exemption is on file, square footage, year built, and often the last sale date and price. Nearly every county puts this online and lets anyone search by name or by address.
The recorder's index shows every deed, mortgage, release, lien, and easement ever filed against the parcel. Anyone can search it by name using the grantor/grantee index. From it you can tell when you bought, what type of deed you received, whether a mortgage was recorded, and whether a satisfaction was later filed that shows the loan is paid off.
None of this is a leak. Public land records exist so that buyers and lenders can confirm who owns what before money changes hands. That transparency is what makes a title marketable. It also means the system was never designed with your privacy in mind, and it is not going to be redesigned for it.
What data brokers add
Public records give a stranger your name and two addresses. Brokers connect those to everything else. The Federal Trade Commission's 2014 report, Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability, described an industry that collects from government records, commercial sources, and other brokers, then builds profiles that can contain thousands of data elements per person.
The consumer-facing end of that industry is the people-search site: the kind that appears on the first page when you search your own name. A typical listing shows current and past addresses, landline and cell numbers, email addresses, approximate age, relatives and associates, business affiliations, and a section labeled something like properties owned. That last section is scraped assessor data, sitting next to a phone number and a birth year.
For a fraudster, that is the whole kit. The phone number and email let them pose as you when contacting a real estate agent or title company. The age tells them whether a fake ID with your name will pass a casual glance. The relatives tell them who might co-own the property or serve as an heir. And the properties section tells them which parcel is worth the effort.
The signals that make a property a target
Seller impersonation fraud is now common enough that ALTA reported 28% of title companies saw at least one attempt in 2023, and CertifID found 54% of real estate professionals saw at least one attempt in a six-month period. The people running these schemes do not pick parcels at random. They filter public data for a few signals.
| Signal in the public record | Where it appears | What it tells a fraudster |
|---|---|---|
| Mailing address differs from property address | Assessor | Owner is absentee; nobody will see a sign or a stranger |
| Land only, no improvement value | Assessor | Vacant lot; easiest category to sell without anyone noticing |
| No mortgage on file, or a recorded satisfaction | Recorder | Free and clear; no lender to object, full equity to take |
| No homestead exemption | Assessor | Not owner-occupied; likely rental or second home |
| Owner age from broker profile | People-search sites | Elderly owners are less likely to check records online |
| LLC or trust as owner | Assessor and state business filings | Harder to reach the real person; agents may accept an entity signer with less scrutiny |
Every one of those signals is legal to publish and free to search. If you recognize your property in two or more rows, you are in the group the FBI and ALTA were describing when they reported 58,141 victims and $1.3 billion in real estate fraud losses from 2019 through 2023. I go deeper on each category in How to Protect Vacant Land from Fraud and Free and Clear Homeowner? Why You're a Deed Fraud Target.
What you can remove, and what you cannot
This is the part most privacy articles get wrong. They imply that a few opt-out forms make you disappear. They do not. Here is the honest breakdown.
| Data | Who holds it | Public? | Can you remove it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your name on the recorded deed | County recorder | Yes, permanently | No. Recorded documents are not withdrawn or edited. |
| Your name on the assessor roll | County assessor | Yes | Rarely. Some states redact for judges, law enforcement, or address confidentiality program participants. Not available to the general public. |
| Mailing address for the tax bill | Assessor or treasurer | Usually | Changeable. You can direct it to a PO box or an attorney. It stays public but reveals less. |
| Purchase price | Recorder, via transfer tax | Often, varies by state | No. Some states are non-disclosure states and never publish it. |
| Mortgage and release documents | County recorder | Yes | No. |
| Phone, email, age, relatives | Data brokers and people-search sites | Commercial, not government | Yes, site by site, through opt-out forms. Reappears when the site re-scrapes. |
| Interior photos and floor plans | Listing portals | Yes | Sometimes. Ask the portal after closing. |
Opting out of people-search sites
Most major people-search sites offer an opt-out or removal page. The process usually means finding your own listing, submitting the URL, and confirming by email. Some make you do it once per listing, and you may have several. The FTC's consumer guidance on protecting your privacy online recommends this kind of cleanup, and it is worth doing, but understand what it buys you. The site removes the profile it currently displays. It does not stop the next scrape of the same public records, so listings come back over months. Paid removal services automate the same forms on a schedule. They are convenient, not magic.
Address confidentiality programs
Most states run a program that lets eligible residents use a substitute address on government records, including some property and voter records. Eligibility is narrow: typically survivors of domestic violence, stalking, or sexual assault, and in some states certain public employees. If you qualify, the program office, usually under the Secretary of State or Attorney General, can tell you which county records it covers. If you do not qualify, this route is closed.
Trusts and LLCs
Holding title in a trust or an LLC replaces your name on the assessor roll with the entity name. That genuinely reduces what a name search returns. It also has costs. The deed transferring the property from you to the entity stays on record forever. State business filings often name an organizer, manager, or registered agent. And entity-held property is one of the higher-risk categories in the table above, because a title agent dealing with an LLC signer has fewer natural checkpoints than one dealing with a homeowner. I cover the tradeoffs in Should I Put My Property in an LLC? and Property in a Trust: Title Protection Differences. This is a decision to make with a real estate attorney in your state, not from a blog post.
Why removing data alone does not stop a forged deed
Suppose you do everything above perfectly. Your phone number is off the people-search sites, your tax bill goes to a PO box, and your name only appears in the recorder's index. A forger still has what they need: your name as it appears on the deed and the property's legal description. A quitclaim deed can be drafted from that, signed in front of a notary with a fake ID or a complicit notary, and delivered to the clerk. The clerk checks form, not truth, and records it. What happens next is in What Happens If Someone Forges a Deed on Your Property?, and the short answer is a quiet title action that typically runs $1,500 to $5,000 and three to six months when uncontested, and $8,000 to $12,000 or more when it is not.
That is why the second half of this problem is not privacy at all. It is making sure that anyone who does try to move the property runs into a checkpoint.
The free version of that checkpoint is your county's property alert program, if it has one. The FTC's August 2024 consumer alert on title-lock marketing recommended checking for a free county alert before paying anyone, and I agree. An alert tells you after a document records.
Title Barrier files a notice in the county land records. It makes the property harder to move through a legitimate title search without contacting the owner. Title companies, lenders, buyers, and attorneys who search the chain of title see the notice and are instructed to verify with you before a transaction proceeds. It is not insurance, it does not reimburse losses, and it does not stop the clerk from recording anything. It costs $199 for setup and recording, then $199 per year per property for dashboard access, authorization requests, and monitoring. Details are at /how-it-works and /pricing.
What to do this month
- Search yourself. Pull up your parcel on the assessor site, run your name in the recorder's index, and search your name plus your city. Write down which people-search sites list your properties next to your phone number. That list is your exposure.
- Fix the mailing address. If the tax bill for a rental or a lot goes to your home, ask the treasurer to send it to a PO box or your attorney. It will not hide that you are absentee, but it stops the record from pointing a stranger to your front door.
- Opt out, then calendar it. Work through the sites on your list. Set a reminder for six months out to check again, because they will repopulate.
- Sign up for the county alert. Free, fast, and better than nothing. If your county does not offer one, check whether a neighboring county does and whether the state has a program.
- Check the recorder's index for your other properties. Absentee owners often have not looked at the chain of title in years. Confirm nothing has recorded that you did not sign.
- Decide on a recorded notice or an ownership structure change. Talk to a real estate attorney in your state about whether a trust or entity fits your situation, and whether a recorded notice like Title Barrier is worth $199 a year for the parcels that match the risk table above.
Closing
Public property records are not going away, and data brokers will keep repackaging them. The realistic goal is to be a worse target than the parcel next to yours: less contact information exposed, an owner who actually checks the record, and a chain of title that tells anyone searching it to slow down and verify.
If you want a plain read on where your specific property falls on the risk signals in this article, the free risk report walks through them. Pricing for the recorded notice is at /pricing.
This article is educational and current as of September 10, 2026. It is not legal advice. Laws on public records, redaction, and property ownership vary by state. Consult a licensed real estate attorney in your state before making decisions about how you hold title.
Sources
- Federal Trade Commission, Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability (May 2014). https://www.ftc.gov/reports/data-brokers-call-transparency-accountability-report-federal-trade-commission-may-2014
- Federal Trade Commission, How To Protect Your Privacy Online. https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-protect-your-privacy-online
- National Association of Realtors, Research and Statistics (2025 Deed and Title Fraud Survey). https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics
- American Land Title Association, seller impersonation fraud resources. https://www.alta.org/
- CertifID, seller impersonation fraud research. https://www.certifid.com/
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, annual reports and real estate fraud data. https://www.ic3.gov/
See also: Seller Impersonation Fraud: How It Works and Who It Targets, Out-of-State Landlords: Why Absentee Ownership Raises Title Risk, How to Verify Property Ownership: A Step-by-Step Guide, 7 Warning Signs of Home Title Theft
Frequently asked questions
Can I remove my name from county property records?
Generally no. Recorded deeds are permanent public records, and assessor rolls list the owner of record by law. A few states allow redaction for narrow groups such as judges, law enforcement, or participants in an address confidentiality program. Most owners can only change the mailing address where the tax bill is sent or hold title through a trust or entity.
How do data brokers get my property information?
They copy it from county assessor and recorder websites, which are public, and merge it with phone numbers, email addresses, ages, and relatives collected from other commercial and public sources. The result is sold as a people-search profile that lists the properties you own next to your contact details.
Does opting out of people-search sites stop deed fraud?
No. Opting out makes you harder to find and harder to impersonate, which is worth doing. But the recorded deed still contains your name and the property's legal description, which is all a forger needs to draft a fraudulent deed. A county clerk will record any document that meets form requirements.
Will putting my house in an LLC or trust hide my name?
Partially. The assessor will list the entity or trustee instead of you. However, state business filings often name an organizer or member, the original transfer deed from you to the entity stays on record, and entity-held property is itself a category fraudsters target because the true owner is harder to reach. Discuss the tradeoffs with a real estate attorney.
Why are vacant land owners targeted so often?
The 2025 NAR Deed and Title Fraud Survey found that 62% of title fraud cases involved vacant land. Land has no occupant to notice a for-sale sign, the owner usually lives elsewhere, and the assessor's mailing address field makes that absentee status obvious to anyone who looks.
What is an address confidentiality program?
A state program, usually run by the Secretary of State or Attorney General, that lets eligible people, typically survivors of domestic violence, stalking, or sexual assault, use a substitute address on government records including some property records. Eligibility is narrow and rules vary by state.
Is Title Barrier a privacy or data removal service?
No. Title Barrier records a legal notice in the county land records that instructs title companies, lenders, and attorneys to verify with the owner before a transaction proceeds. It does not remove data, it is not insurance, and it does not stop a clerk from recording a document. It costs $199 to set up and $199 per year per property.
