This episode details the second major scam attempt on Serious Land Capital—a North Carolina commercial deal that made it to one day before close with a sophisticated title company fooled until the seller’s number disconnected. The real seller was reached via skip-traced Illinois numbers, confirming fraud, exposing process gaps in relying on land investors’ seller contact rather than direct verification.
Key Takeaways:
- Scammers Got Past Attorney-Led Title Companies The scammer provided notarized IDs and business addresses that passed attorney review up until mobile notary deployment triggered disappearance—even sophisticated title operations missed red flags until the last moment.
- PPC Leads Require Aggressive Skip Tracing Now Every non-mail lead gets background checks and skip tracing before DD begins—two scams in a row means presuming guilt until multiple phone numbers, addresses, and identity markers confirm legitimacy.
- The Funder Gap Is a Structural Weakness Never speaking directly to sellers creates unavoidable blind spots that require overcompensation through skip tracing, ID verification, and title company protocols since assumptions about investor-seller contact proved unreliable.
Hear the full episode for the updated fraud detection protocols and why speed requirements in competitive deals sometimes force moving forward before all verification steps complete.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious. Thanks for your patience as we publish this one on a day delay here. I promise it was for a good reason. It’s just heads down really since late last Friday, just trying to push through this project here. So more to come on that, a lot to report here shortly. And also, know, first pod since…
Halloween trick-or-treating, you know, I have a three-year-old as of you know this next week roughly and You know my wife and I weren’t in town last year for trick-or-treating but you know, we were here this year and I feel I Don’t know if anybody else can relate here, you know, and my wife and I were growing up a lot of our Trick-or-treating ages within the 1990s. I’m sure
you know, similar before that, but like in the neighborhoods, we would go knock on doors to get the candy. mean, there would be a handful of houses that would have the, you know, bowls of candy that were out outside. And, you know, if you were polite and respectful, especially the smaller kids, yeah, you might take like one or two pieces. And I remember getting close to like a teenage years. Yeah, wouldn’t, those houses were kind of targets and you just take as much as you can.
and leave none for any anyone else here. So, you know, that was always kind of the risk of that strategy. But now, like, I was just so stunned how how things have changed. I don’t know if this is like a covid thing, but like when we were around in our neighborhood in Austin here, there was no doorbell ringing. I think one family rang our doorbell and we were too late to get to the door here. But when we were taking out our daughter for
Trick-or-treating it was and you know, luckily it was like a nice day, right? October in Austin some of the best time of year And people were either outside like they had little stations on their driveway where they would kind of give out candy some folks dressed up, know most of them probably or You know a number of the houses just had bowls of candy sitting out like that was just a new norm for
for trick-or-treating here. So just bring this up as like a little anecdote, because it took me aback a little bit. Yeah, it’s like obviously easier once we got home, like we just put a bowl out there and later in the night some teenagers, yeah, just we saw in our front door can like just took the whole bowl. So pays back what I did when I was younger too.
But like, almost kind of wonder now like this, you know, post COVID world we live in here where there’s just almost like this permeating isolation. And, you know, we already know that like people are less social and, you know, less together time and so forth. But now even like trick or treating, it’s like, okay, we were so avoidant for
Contact or maybe like bother and you know perceived bothering of other folks even on this big holiday that like yeah We’re not even ringing ringing doors anymore. It’s like yeah, I can’t be bothered just leave the lit leave the candy outside and You know let people come and and take it as they will here I’m like, I don’t know when this changed like this is the first year that I’ve ever noticed that Like, you know, let me know in the comments or
you know, DM me or something, hey, if this has been going on for a while here, but I feel like this is a COVID thing. You’ll notice like if service technicians come to your house too, or wherever your door, like they’ll ring the doorbell and stand like 10 feet back or something. That was never the case when I was growing up. It’s like, yeah, people just stand right there. So, yeah, it’s just like one of those other shifts culturally where it’s like, yeah, there’s some pros to it.
Um, you know, like I don’t need to get up and answer a door anymore, but it’s like, yeah, we have even less, less contact with each other than, um, uh, we’ve already been trending too. So just, uh, like a quick, a quick little anecdote there. Hopefully you found that a little entertaining. Um, the other thing I wanted to get into. I wrote about, uh, this week that, um, you know, anticipated like killer commercial deal and North Carolina.
participating closing on. Turns out it was another scam. Didn’t get as deep into the process as the guy who brought witnesses to a US embassy in Dubai, successfully pulling that off, but still got the title company up to just the day before close where they had their IDs and like.
the title company we’re working with is, know, sophisticated operation. They handle like a lot of the book, like all eyes open for scams. And they were noting, yeah, no, like key red flags here at the moment. Cause you know what happened when we were anticipating closing was like the day before, closing, you know, the title company was like, no, we need to have like our, you mobile notary service go out to your address. And they were kind of upset about that.
They wanted to do their own mail away notary. And then, you know, after that point in time, we weren’t able to get ahold of the seller anymore. you know, at first thought, yeah, potentially a bit more cold feet seems to be sick. And then it turns out. So.
You know, we, waited a few days here, to see whether the seller was going to come back, you know, lightly touching, touching base. And then it turned out that that cell or the cell number we were, we were in touch with, it was disconnected, potentially blocked and like, yeah, it could be, you know, it was blocking. have, you again, cold feet about pursuing this deal.
Then we skip traced a couple other numbers the title company tried reaching out to one they couldn’t get a hold of it And so then I tried the numbers on my personal cell just see okay is this like a full block across everybody? You know so far the seller has no idea who I am yet and like the main number was still Disconnected it’s like yeah, this seems like it’s probably more of a scam here and then based on the skip trace numbers like I called on my personal line, which is still registered in
or still an area code from Illinois and it seems the seller was based there. And I talked to the real seller and it’s like, yeah, this, you know, clearly a scam here. Um, and you know, it’s, it’s certainly disappointing. You know, fortunately we didn’t invest as many resources this time around as we had for that Florida deal. Um, but still we put in like significant time for due diligence, had a broker out there, et cetera. Um,
like had all of our funds lined up and it’s still like, okay, we just dealt with one here. we now we get, you know, getting money, didn’t get wired in, but it’s still like, man, just there’s another scammer who’s come to the fore with this too. And it’s like, I’m sure some of you are thinking, are you like, yeah, aren’t you guys have like a better eye out for this and try to catch it? And like, this was a concern like right from the start, you know, especially coming off at Florida one, like we started asking those questions right away.
And we need like any lead that isn’t a lead from mail. Like we have to be concerned. So this one was from PPC. And so already I was like, okay, what info do we have about this person? Like, do we know their true address here? Like, do we have any understanding that they’re confirmed that they’re like at their county?
county assigned address, you know, that that’s associated with the property in question. And so like I had a lot of back and forth with the land investor who brought us this deal. And even like, you know, the the name of this individual seemed to have like a, you know, South Asian type of name. So I was even asking about that.
sound like they had an accident, an accident. And he’s like, yeah, it was confirmed. And, you know, that that’s the risk of us too, as a funder here is it’s like, yeah, I can have my antenna up for potential scam, but like, since we’re generally, you know, never directly dealing with the seller, like a lot of the info just has to be reported back to me. So I’ve been making a lot of assumptions.
and only, you know, taking the word for how the seller in question was like actually conveying things over to the land investor who sent us the deal. So like our antenna were definitely up earlier on, but again, they were this, this seller was passed and then like we, had to move so quickly. So, um, it was like a risk of, yeah, we’re going to do some upfront work here if it ends up being a scam. Yeah. We’ll get like,
found out here too, but like we also have to plan for this being real and we have enough evidence in place here to continue to move forward before things might come to light here. And again, like the title company we’re working with does a lot of double closes and like, you know, the, you know, was North Carolina. So they have, you know, attorney led title companies and even the attorney was providing opinions on he’s like, yeah, I, the, there haven’t been.
you know, immediate red flags here, you know, the notarization address that we have here seems to be linked to, you know, the business address of the seller in question, which could be a bit unusual. But again, we’re like deferring to the judgment of, you know, again, title companies probably have, you know, more antenna in the air than any of us. Just because again, they’re the most liable and they deal with this every single day shuttling.
millions, not billions of dollars back and forth cumulatively. So, you know, the fact that they were a bit more lax on that, you know, made us think that, yeah, this could potentially just be a seller cold feet situation. Like that was, that was more of my assumption at the time. And then it, turned into more of like, this is seems a bit more scam likely though that scam question was like always in the back of my mind throughout this whole process.
And again, like the, the title company had the IDs as well too. Like I didn’t personally inspect those now, to go through, cause like that process had already been moving so quickly and moving forward and you know, title company was just more confident and they weren’t raising flags initially here. but now it’s like, okay, this is now twice where we’re just going to have to reef.
readjust our processes again.
to account for this risk. So yes, like we do have that ID check piece, which is like, you know, it certainly helps to a certain extent, but like we also, when you have to move fast sometimes too, it’s like, okay, always getting, you know, the ID, yeah, you want to get that now, whether the title company has it or not.
But sometimes when you got to move with speed, it’s like, okay, we still have to act on this even before like, you know, waiting for the ID to be sent over to us. And even with that in mind, like we would just now be doing more skip tracing, bit more background checking on the seller. Like, you know, cause when I was looking at the phone number sent to us, like it wasn’t appearing on Google search, didn’t seem to be associated with the seller, but like we weren’t, you know.
deeper skip tracing like at every lead that was coming into us, especially one that was getting deeper into our DD cycle. So now that’s just gonna have to be a given, like two times in a row here, especially for bigger properties. this is now clearly becoming more of a trend and where we still have to like operate.
within some amount of ignorance because of our position as a funder having a gap between us dealing with the seller. So we’re just gonna have to have even more protections in place since we have to bake in so many assumptions and not having direct contact with that supposed seller is gonna be its own weakness within our process here that we’re just gonna have to be able to overcome quicker in other ways. Again, fortunately no money got wired. This one was.
easier to catch than the Florida one. Certainly they weren’t as sophisticated, but still like they got deep, deep, deep into the title companies process where they put all the work forward, like got to the point of getting notarization set up and where the attorney for the title company still wasn’t calling them out. Even up until like the last day. So we had to uncover the scam and report it back to the title company.
before they uncovered it. So, you know, that just tells you something. So be, keep your eyes out for that disappointing again, but you know, it’s really not that big of a loss. Like we, learn our lessons, like the DD, the, and the underwriting that we did on the deal. All of that still applies, right? Like I, you know, again, volume negates luck. Like it just makes me a better underwriter. I understand the market even better now. Um, even if that, uh, doesn’t come to fruition for, for profits for us. Um, but it gives me more bullets.
to consider other deals that will be legitimate. So, again, hopefully this helps. SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs. Hopefully non-scammer related 50K minimum purchase price deals and land daily diligence Facebook group for review of your land deals. I’ll be back on this Thursday for more here. Excited to see you all. Subscribe and share everybody. Take care. Bye.
