Notarizing a document means witnessing a signature, and verifying that the right person signed a document, knowingly and voluntarily. Yet bad actors can, and often do, turn up at the recorder’s office with bad deeds, wrecking the rightful homeowners’ lives. The notary system is vulnerable. Is it obsolete? Maybe not.
Consider a squatter in San Antonio who, in 2019, faked a notary seal to “verify” the signatures of a long-dead couple. The point of this was to file a fraudulent general warranty deed and thereby sell the property to an investor. The squatter botched not just one but both of the deceased owners’ names — but also got away with filing a corrective deed for the property.
Sometimes, abuse happens right under the notaries’ noses. In a September 2019 article in The National Notary magazine titled Loose Notary Seals Sink Deals, Michael Closen writes about the ease with which a notary’s tools, if not properly kept in locked drawers or filing cabinets, are deliberately misused in office settings. Lawyers or co-workers can just grab and use notaries’ seals and journals. Seals that have expired sometimes show in thrift shops, or in online marketplaces. An expired seal is attractive to a fraudster who knows how to fake signatures and backdate documents.
Moreover, notaries themselves are only human. They can fail to fail to detect fakes when checking document signers’ ID cards.
Read more on Deeds.com: Modernizing an Archaic Notary System for Real Estate Documents