Potter County Clerks Office offers free subscription for property fraud alerts

KFDA
By Devyn Darmstetter
Published: Jan. 3, 2023 at 4:10 PM GMT-7

AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - The Potter County Clerks Office is now offering a free subscription service that will alert you via text or email.

“If you have any kind of real estate here in Potter County, I believe that anybody can be a target. There are people who could actually file fraudulent liens against you too. Our duty is just to record the paperwork if it meets the statutory requirement,” says Julie Smith, Potter County Clerk.

“There’s a big misconception with this type of crime, that if a bad guy goes to the County Clerk’s Office and wants to steal your house, that the county clerk can stop that in some way. The truth is that if somebody goes in with the correct documentation, the clerk has to file that they don’t have an option to say I want to stop this in most places,” says Peter Ollis, Property Fraud Alert Specialist, Fidlar Technologies.

Potter County hasn’t seen the risk of property fraud in our area yet, but the clerk’s office says they are taking charge by providing a way for citizens to be notified and protected.

“It’s kind of preventative maintenance in a way. It doesn’t really protect somebody from this happening to them, but at least gives them notification because I think what’s happened or what I understand is that it might be years down the road and somebody’s had their house paid off. And then they go to either refinance it, or they go to sell it and all of a sudden, they found out that this is in a different name, and they didn’t know,” says Smith.

The service is now available and free for public use.

“This is something that would allow them to at least get notification that ‘Hey, your name has been involved in something that’s been recorded in this office’,” says Smith