Long Island Property Owners Fending Off Variety Of Threats This Season

Blog August 20, 2020 By Admin
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Long Island property owners are facing a whole tsunami of threats this year. Stay alert, protect your assets.

If our high property taxes and prices weren’t nuisance enough, it has been COVID-19, property closures, civil unrest, rising crime and an active start to the storm season. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there.

Property Taxes

Nassau County was already off to a very controversial year for property taxes before COVID-19 landed on most people’s radar. Now in the aftermath of all the above, we should be bracing for even higher property taxes to pay for all of these things.

As we also recently covered, many tax authorities around the country have also turned to seizing tax delinquent properties to create substantial new revenue streams. Even if they are late on fees of less than $10.

Census Bureau Scams 

Life Lock has been warning of new US Census Bureau scams. They can target you through the internet, phone, mail and even in person at your front door. Don’t fall for threats. Make sure you know how to identify real Census Bureau workers and verify their ID.

Forced Placed Property Insurance

One of the big scams leading up to the 2008 housing crisis was forced place insurance by mortgage companies. They would claim to not have received your insurance policy information, and then hit you with a forced placed policy for thousands of dollars. If you don’t pay it, they will stop applying your monthly mortgage payments, and throw you into default and foreclosure. If you are running into notices or issues like this with your lender or loan servicer it is best to get a great lawyer on the case right away.

Bank Mortgage Fraud

In the previous housing crisis which some attribute to bank manipulation, all the big name banks were involved in major fraud cases and settlements. Often for illegally forging signatures and foreclosing on property owners.

Recently it was found that Wells Fargo had been throwing many borrowers into forbearance programs and failing to apply their payments. All without borrower permission. At first many were unsure what they had to gain from this, and if it was a ploy to get federal funds. Now a new report from Bloomberg shows that when there hasn’t been a mortgage payment applied in 90 days, the banks can trade these loans at deep discounts for billions in instant profits. Effectively robbing both investors and property owners.

What To Do

Stay alert to trending scams, verify everything, protect your identity, open the mail, watch for  credit alerts, challenge your property taxes, and don’t wait to act.