In 2023, Palm Beach County prosecuted four cases of deed theft. In 2025, that number was 184. Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Mike Caruso has publicly stated that the number could reach 800 to 1,000 cases this year.
That’s a 4,500% increase in three years.
For anyone who owns property in Palm Beach County — and especially for UHNW families managing multiple properties, seasonal residents who leave homes vacant for months, and estate managers overseeing high-value real estate portfolios — this is the most significant property security development in the region right now.
What deed theft actually looks like
The mechanism is straightforward. A criminal obtains enough personal information about a property owner to forge a deed transfer. In documented cases across Palm Beach County, this has involved forged signatures, fake driver’s licenses, and manufactured notarizations. The fraudulent deed is recorded with the Palm Beach County Clerk’s office — and because Florida is an open-records state, the deed becomes part of the public record.
Once the fraudulent deed is recorded, the criminal either sells the property to an unsuspecting buyer or takes out a mortgage against it. In one Boca Raton case that’s been in litigation for three years, a forged deed was used to sell a property for $360,000. The rightful owner has been fighting to reclaim their own land ever since.
The particularly insidious aspect of deed theft is that it can happen without the property owner knowing for weeks or months. If you don’t check your property records regularly — and most people don’t — a forged deed could be sitting in the public record while a criminal is marketing your property for sale.
Why Palm Beach County is a primary target
Several factors make Palm Beach County particularly vulnerable to this kind of fraud.
Florida property records are public. Anyone can access them, search them, and use the information they contain to build a targeting profile on any property owner in the state. Name, address, purchase price, property dimensions, and ownership history are all freely available.
The seasonal population creates vacancy windows. A significant percentage of luxury properties in Palm Beach County are occupied only during the winter season. When the owner is at their Hampton’s residence from May through October, the Palm Beach property sits vacant — and a vacant property whose owner is 1,200 miles away is the ideal target for deed fraud.
The concentration of high-value properties creates high-reward opportunities. A fraudulent deed on a $50,000 lot in central Florida is a crime. A fraudulent deed on a $15 million oceanfront property on Palm Beach Island is an entirely different category of opportunity for a sophisticated criminal operation.
What the Clerk’s office is doing
Palm Beach County Clerk Mike Caruso has launched a free Property Fraud Alert service. Property owners who register receive immediate email notifications whenever a document is recorded in the Official Records that matches their name, address, or parcel number. As of early 2026, approximately 9,700 property owners had signed up.
That’s a start — but in a county with over 600,000 residential properties, 9,700 registrations represents approximately 1.6% coverage. The vast majority of property owners remain unmonitored.
What estate security professionals should be doing
For UHNW property owners and the estate managers who oversee their properties, deed theft represents a threat category that most residential security programs don’t address. It’s not a physical intrusion. It’s not a cyber attack. It’s a records-based fraud that exploits the same public information infrastructure that makes Florida property transactions transparent.
A comprehensive estate security program in Palm Beach County should now include property records monitoring as a standard component. This means registering for the Clerk’s Property Fraud Alert service (free), monitoring property records on a regular cadence, ensuring that all property ownership structures (LLCs, trusts, family entities) are registered for alerts under every name variation, and integrating property records monitoring into the broader security posture alongside physical security, digital exposure management, and staff vetting.
For properties held through LLCs or trust structures — which is common among UHNW owners seeking privacy — the monitoring needs to cover both the entity name and the individual names associated with the entity. A fraudulent deed filed against “Palm Beach Holdings LLC” won’t trigger an alert registered under the owner’s personal name.
For seasonal properties that will be vacant for extended periods, the exposure window is significant. Physical security (guard services, mobile patrol, vacancy checks) addresses the burglary risk. Property records monitoring addresses the deed theft risk. Both need to be active simultaneously.
The convergence with digital exposure
Deed theft often begins with digital intelligence collection. The personal information needed to forge a deed — full legal name, property address, ownership history, and sometimes Social Security numbers — is available through the same data broker ecosystem that we audit for every client’s digital exposure assessment.
If your home address is findable through commercial data brokers (and in Florida, it almost certainly is), a criminal researching deed theft targets can build a comprehensive profile without ever physically visiting your property. The combination of public property records and commercial data broker information provides everything needed to attempt a fraudulent deed transfer.
This is why digital exposure management and estate security are not separate problems. They are the same problem observed from different angles. The firms providing estate security in Palm Beach County need to be addressing both simultaneously.
What to do right now
If you own property in Palm Beach County, take these steps immediately.
Register for the free Property Fraud Alert service at mypalmbeachclerk.com/pfa. Register every name variation, entity name, and address variation associated with your properties.
Check your property records through the Clerk’s Official Records Search to verify that no unauthorized documents have been recorded.
If you manage multiple properties or own through LLC/trust structures, ensure that every entity is registered for monitoring under every name variation.
If you own seasonal property that will be vacant for extended periods, coordinate your physical security (guard services, mobile patrol) with property records monitoring.
If you want a comprehensive assessment of your property’s exposure — covering physical security, digital exposure, staff access, and records-based vulnerabilities — contact HK Defense Solutions for an Estate Security Assessment.
Contact us at +1 (561) 946-9843 or hkdef.com/contact-us/ .
