NC legislator seeks to better protect homeowners after woman charged with filing false deed on Raleigh dentist’s house

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — State Sen. Mary Wills Bode is advocating for changes to the law and processes at register of deeds offices statewide after a woman was accused of filing a fraudulent warranty deed on a home in Wake County .

Homeowner Dr. Craig Adams, a local dentist, contacted Senator Bode after he learned of a fraudulent warranty deed filed on his multimillion-dollar Raleigh home last week. Dawn Mangum is charged with attempting to obtain property by false pretense after she allegedly filed the false deed on the home back in August.

Now, Bode says changes should be made to prevent this from happening to other homeowners.

“This is an issue that has taken up a lot of Dr. Adams’s time, it’s taken time from our law enforcement, it’s taken up time from our judiciary,” Senator Bode said. “We could have a barcode code on a notary that the register of deeds and anyone who wanted to verify the legitimacy of a notary seal could scan it and cross-reference it in a North Carolina database to make sure that that notary is active and that notary seal hasn’t been stolen, and fortify that process because that notary seal carries so much weight.”

“Any homeowner in Wake County can sign up to get an alert if any type of fraudulent activity, suspicious activity is happening with your deed,” she continued. “They will send you an email and let you know that system in North Carolina does not exist in every county. What we would like to do is get an appropriation so every county can implement this fraud system. But we also want to make it an opt out system, not an opt in system.”

That current fraud alert system in Wake County is an opt-in system, so property owners have to sign up to benefit from it. Adams says he did not know about the fraud alert system, but even if he was signed up prior to this happening, an alert would not have been triggered since his name was not on the fraudulent deed. He says after this incident, he is now signed up.

“It’s harder to get in Costco than it is to file a false warranty claim deed,” he said. “There needs to be some way to it once the fraud is known in this case. Rather than going around this huge expensive legal case, there needs to be some way to expunge this fraudulent claim without spending thousands of dollars spending months doing it.”

Those thousands of dollars, Adams says, have gone to him filing a lawsuit against Mangum in an attempt to get the case in front of a judge. Wake County says in order to remove the documents from record, there must be a court order. Bode says she is also exploring a way to reverse fraudulent documents in the system in a timely and cost-effective manner.

A spokesperson with Wake County tells CBS 17 there was no suspicion of fraud when the warranty deed was filed and to their knowledge, there has been just one legal action filed in the county to remove an alleged fraudulent deed from the registry within the last four years.

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