Brazen excuse given by amateur ‘fraudster’ for stealing dentist’s $4M house – and why homeowners everywhere should be concerned

An alleged squatter, who police say put the deed to a $4 million property in her name, said she thought the house had been foreclosed on when she took over the deed. Homeowners should be careful because such schemes are easy to pull off.

North Carolina resident Dawn Mangum never met Raleigh dentist Craig Adams when she reportedly signed the deed to his $4.5 million property.

Since being arrested on Monday for a crime of attempting to obtain property by false pretenses, she has changed her mind and claims it was all one big mistake.

Mangum is accused of going to the Land Registry and claiming, without any evidence, that he owned the house on Alpine Creek Drive.

When achieved by ABC 11Mangum said she was convinced she could claim ownership of an abandoned property because it was briefly listed as a foreclosed property.

“My goal is not to take anyone’s home, but to locate and renovate abandoned properties,” she told the newspaper.

She was arrested on Monday on felony charges, but has now changed her mind and claims it was all one big mistake.

After her arrest, which left her in jail on a $150,000 bond, she told ABC 11 that she was eager to get her property back from Adams and that she stopped all paperwork when she realized the house wasn’t actually foreclosed on.

However, under North Carolina law, there is no rollback button, and the only way Adams can get the ownership records straightened out is to sue Mangum in civil court, which he estimates will cost him about $8,000.

“Something like that makes you feel violated, vulnerable and scared,” he said WRAL“So many of my patients come in and say, ‘How can this happen? It’s absurd.’”

After putting his 8,000-square-foot home up for sale, Mangum says he filed documents with the Wake County Land Registry in an attempt to take over his home.

He suspects that Mangum planned to squat in his home, where he still lives with his wife, and wanted to use the deed to delay the eviction.

According to Adams, the woman did not have to provide any proof to the Land Registry that she actually owned the house and ‘no investigation was done into who the owner of the property is’.

“If there had been just one simple check, my name would have appeared,” he insisted to the newspaper. “There are no accountability measures… nothing.”

Adams is confident he would not have known about the alleged fraudulent act if the homeowners association’s property management company had not called his neighbor.

Dr Craig Adams told DailyMail.com that he plans to resolve the matter by hiring a lawyer and taking the case to court, which will cost him a lot of money.

Mangum is accused of going to the Land Registry and, without any evidence, claiming ownership of the house on Alpine Creek Drive (pictured)

According to ABC 11, Mangum had called the company to gain access to the community.

“I probably would never know,” he told WRAL. “That’s pretty scary for North Carolinians, because anybody can go downtown and file a false claim for somebody else’s property.”

Even after he explained to the Land Registry that Mangum had submitted the documents fraudulently, he was told that he had to prove this in court to have the title deed amended.

A spokesperson for the province told WRAL that the Land Registry “is not obliged to verify the legal validity of a deed when it is submitted for registration, nor to verify the qualifications or legal status of the notary or the drafters of the document.”

“With over 500 documents processed through the Wake County Land Registry each day, it is impossible to verify the legitimacy of each document or the qualifications of each notary. Additionally, the Land Registry does not have access to a database of licensed notaries in North Carolina to verify this,” the researchers said.

According to Adams, the woman did not have to provide any proof to the Land Registry that she actually owned the house and ‘no investigation was done into who the owner of the property is’

Pictured: A copy of the document Dawn Mangum filed with the Wake County Register of Deeds Office

Craig Adams was listed as a debtor on the property and said he would not have known about the deed change if the homeowners association’s property management company had not called his neighbor when Mangum tried to gain access to the gated community.

‘Employees of the Land Registry are not lawyers and are expressly prohibited from providing legal advice or acting as a lawyer when verifying a document.’

When employees are aware of fraudulent actions, they will alert the Tax Authorities so that they can freeze the changes to tax data relating to the property. They will also alert the police.

Property fraud is rare, but it’s “something homeowners should be aware of,” attorney Cara Dudek-Petri Gibbons told WRAL.

This is especially true for properties owned by LLCs or that have already been paid off.

Unfortunately for Adams, victims of fraud are left “having to spend money to clean up something they didn’t do anything about,” according to Dudek-Petri Gibbons.

Regardless of her criminal case, Adams must still go through civil court to have her record corrected.

Mangum is expected to appear in criminal court again on October 8.