A Louisiana woman is fighting to reclaim the title to a property that’s been in her family for centuries.
The victim, DaNita Batiste, is battling to reestablish a clear title on the property, months after fraudsters impersonated her using a phony ID and sold the land for cash to unsuspecting investors.
It’s a form of real estate fraud that is becoming increasingly common, and investigators believe this case in Louisiana could be linked to an international crime ring.
Batiste, a health care administrator in her 50s who lives in Texas, inherited the residential lot in Lake Charles, LA, from her mother in 2020 shortly before she died.
“That land’s been in our family for generation after generation, 200 years and maybe further back,” Batiste, who is of French Creole descent, tells Realtor.com®.
The house on the property was destroyed in Hurricane Laura, and she planned to rebuild a home there and find rental tenants as a future source of side income.
Until then, Batiste had little involvement with the lot, aside from hiring someone to cut the grass twice a month and paying the property taxes each year. But despite receiving offers, she vowed never to sell, viewing the property as an inheritance to be passed down to her own children someday.
So, when she went online to pay taxes on the lot in December, she was shocked to learn that the property had been sold for $45,000 cash the prior month and had a new corporate owner, Louisiana-based Live Oak Insurance Co.
Stunned, Batiste called Live Oak CEO Andrew David Hankins, who had signed the deed for the property transfer, and learned that he had no idea that the person who sold him the lot was not the real Batiste.
“I’m the real DaNita Batiste,” she recalls telling Hankins. “And he goes, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘I own that property. I did not sell it to you. I don’t know who did, but I didn’t.’”
Batiste and Hankins reported the matter to the police. An official with the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed the case was under investigation but declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.
Fortunately, due to Batiste quickly flagging the fraud, the $45,000 that Live Oak paid for the parcel was quickly frozen and the charges reversed, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Yet the title for the property has yet to be returned to Batsite’s name, despite her repeated appeals for assistance to the Lake Charles law firm that filed a deed recording the fraudulent sale. The firm, Stutes & Lavergne, did not respond to an email seeking comment from Realtor.com.
Hankins also did not respond to a phone message seeking an interview, which was left with a receptionist at the Lake Charles funeral home where he is also a funeral director and CEO.
There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of any of the parties in the fraudulent sale, aside from the as-yet unidentified criminals who impersonated Batiste.
Still, Batiste is frustrated that her forged signature, which was accompanied by a stolen Texas notary stamp and two bogus witness signatures, passed the vetting process that is supposed to weed out fraud in real estate transactions.
Making the case particularly outrageous, the fraudsters didn’t even sign the deed using her correct name. Instead, they signed it “Danita Leday,” the maiden name she has not used for decades.
Batiste hopes that sharing her story will alert others to the identity theft scam and raise awareness for both property owners and real estate professionals.
“What if I was in the process of building a house on that land?” she says. “I would be all held up, because I no longer appear to own it.”
Investigators suspect Louisiana case is tied to international scammer ring
A person familiar with the investigation told Realtor.com that the fraudulent sale of Batiste’s land fits a pattern of scams occurring nationwide, and might have ties to an international crime ring.
The proceeds from the phony sale in Lake Charles were traced to a bank account tied to an address in the Bronx, NY.
That account had been opened with a passport issued by the African nation of Sierra Leone, although investigators believe the passport was forged under a false identity.
The bank account in question has been frozen, and investigators are attempting to determine whether it was used in other similar real estate scams that have occurred across the country.
“It’s going nationwide,” the source tells Realtor.com. “I think they gain access to the online clerk of courts, and they’re looking for individuals who own property but don’t live at the property, or who are not in the same city.”
As an out-of-state owner of a vacant property with no outstanding mortgage, Batiste unfortunately fit the profile favored by the scam ring.
How homeowners can protect against similar scams
Marx David Sterbcow, a real estate fraud attorney and managing partner of New Orleans law firm Sterbcow Law Group, tells Realtor.com that he has seen similar fraud cases proliferate in recent years.
“It’s an industry problem, and there needs to be something done to help manage that,” he says. “When we started shifting to remote closings and digital signatures, that absolutely put this on a rocket course for problems, for people across the United States.”
Sterbcow says the No. 1 thing property owners can do to protect themselves from fraudulent sales is to buy a homeowner’s policy of title insurance, which covers legal fees to defend the title.
Property owners at high risk of being targeted, including the elderly and owners who live in a different state, might also consider a commercial “title lock” product, which can help alert the property owner if someone tries to make unauthorized changes to the property’s title.
Many counties also offer free title monitoring, and homeowners can sign up for automatic alerts from the county clerk if there is any update to the records on their property.
Sterbcow notes that, in many cases, title fraud or fraudulent deeds can go undetected by an absentee homeowner for years, making the problem even more difficult to correct.
“She’s very, very fortunate that she found this so quickly,” he says of Batiste’s case. “I’ve seen a lot of people over the years that have gotten absolutely, positively destroyed by some of these scams, including some that are very sophisticated.”