$283,019 an acre. $285,326 an acre. $294,118 an acre. Three pieces of Concord land, three recorded sales, all within four percent of each other on a per-acre basis. Two of those sellers owned what they sold. The one in the middle did not.
That middle number is 22-B Mattison Drive, the 1.84-acre lot that federal prosecutors say was stolen from its owners and sold to a developer for $525,000 in May 2024. Nearly every account of the case has described the sale as happening at half of what the land was worth, which is a reasonable way to describe the loss. It is not a good description of what the transaction looked like from inside the deal. I pulled the MLS PIN record for every closed land sale in Concord going back to 2019, and against that record the fraudulent sale is unremarkable. It priced itself into the market, not under it.
That is the part of this case worth your time. Deed fraud gets written up as an internet scam that happens to careless people. This one was not. It ran for seven months through a licensed Massachusetts agent, a live MLS listing, two attorneys and a real closing, and the professionals in that chain were the actual target. If you own land, a rental you rarely visit, or anything you inherited and have not thought about in a while, the exposure is real. If you practice in this business, the checklist you are probably relying on would have caught about half of this.
What happened on Mattison Drive
Omar and Halla Jaraki bought a vacant lot in the Mattison Farms subdivision in Concord in 1991 and later moved to South Carolina. They kept paying the taxes. They never listed it.
According to the federal charging documents and the civil complaint their attorney filed in Middlesex Superior Court, someone set up an email account in the owner’s name in August 2023 and contacted a Massachusetts real estate agent about selling the land. A listing agreement was signed electronically in October. The lot went live on MLS PIN on October 13, 2023 at $699,900. It was reduced to $599,900. A local developer offered $525,000 and the sale closed in May 2024, with the seller side executed under a power of attorney the owners never granted.
The impersonators used a counterfeit South Carolina driver’s license and a counterfeit United States passport in the owners’ names, communicated through Gmail and Google Voice accounts, and, per court filings reported by Boston.com, connected to those accounts from Nigerian IP addresses. The proceeds check, a little over $496,000, was routed to a UPS Store in the Philadelphia area and deposited into a brokerage account. The money was gone within weeks.
The Jarakis found out in August 2024, when they called Concord Town Hall looking for a tax bill that had stopped arriving. By then the lot had been cleared, a foundation poured and a house framed, financed by a $1.8 million construction loan recorded against land the developer had bought in good faith from a person who did not exist. Construction is now paused under a court injunction while the case is litigated.
The federal charges, and what a complaint is not
On July 23, 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts announced charges against three men, arrested a week earlier on July 16:
- Moshe Levi, 57, of Carrollton, Texas, charged with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.
- Kyon James, 44, of Middleboro, Massachusetts, charged with money laundering conspiracy.
- Bradley Beauge, 41, of Somerset, New Jersey, charged with money laundering conspiracy.
Prosecutors allege the scheme identified vacant, unencumbered parcels in Massachusetts, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee whose owners lived out of state, then impersonated those owners well enough to get real estate professionals to list, negotiate and deed the properties to buyers who had no idea. Across the four states the group allegedly shared or attempted to share in roughly $1.5 million between June 2023 and June 2024. The other targets reportedly included land owned by two lawyers in Georgia and a lottery winner’s parcel in Indiana.
One distinction that most of the coverage has blurred, and it changes how you should read the case. These men were charged by criminal complaint, not by grand jury indictment. A complaint is a sworn application supported by probable cause, filed by prosecutors, and it is how a federal case starts when agents need to arrest quickly. An indictment from a grand jury normally follows. All three are presumed innocent, and Levi is the only one charged with the fraud itself. James and Beauge are charged with moving the money, which is a different allegation.
The price was not the tell
Here is where the public record and the MLS record part company.
The lot has been described as selling for about half its value, anchored to an estimated market value of roughly $1 million. That estimate is defensible as a builder’s residual. Finished houses on identical 1.84-acre Mattison Drive lots have closed at $1,665,625 in 2016, $2,067,500 in 2018, $2,950,000 in 2022, $2,400,000 in 2025 and $2,740,000 in May 2026. Back a $2.4 million to $2.9 million finished product into land and construction cost and you land near seven figures for the dirt.
But nobody at that closing table was looking at a residual. They were looking at land comps. I queried MLS PIN directly for every closed land sale in Concord from January 2019 forward. Seventeen usable sales, and here is where the fraudulent one falls.
The stolen lot ranks fifth of seventeen. It sits between a 6.36-acre parcel on Musterfield Road at $283,019 an acre and a 1.87-acre parcel on Annursnac Hill Road at $294,118 an acre.
Run the tighter comparison and it gets worse. Restrict to Concord land sales between 1.8 and 2.2 acres, the closest thing to a true comparable, and the most recent one before this listing went live was 53A Annursnac Hill Road: 1.87 acres, closed July 2023 at $550,000. Three months later the Mattison lot listed at $699,900, which was 27 percent above that comp. It closed ten months after it at $525,000, within five percent of it.
The fraud did not undercut the market. It listed high, sat, cut once, and closed slightly under the last comparable sale. That is what an ordinary land listing does.
Why land is the asset class this scheme picks
Land gets targeted because it is vacant and usually unmortgaged. That is the standard explanation and it is true. The part that gets left out is that land is also the only residential asset class where a steep discount reads as normal.
I ran every Massachusetts closed sale in MLS PIN from September 2024 through September 2026 and compared how often each property type closes far below its original asking price.
14.2%
1.5%
0.8%
Take those two facts together. A house that closes at 75 percent of its original ask is in the bottom one percent of Massachusetts sales and somebody asks why. A piece of land that does the same thing is in a group of roughly 190 sales a year, and nobody asks anything. Sitting on the market for seven months is not a warning sign in land either. It is the average.
The people who ran this understood that. They did not need to price the lot to move fast. They needed to price it so that no professional in the chain would feel the need to make a phone call.
The industry’s own red-flag list caught half of it
The American Land Title Association publishes a one-page seller impersonation fraud alert that is genuinely good and widely circulated to agents and closing attorneys. It lists four red flags. Score the Concord transaction against it.
| ALTA red flag | 22-B Mattison Drive | Caught? |
| Property is a vacant lot or not owner occupied | Vacant 1.84-acre lot, owners in South Carolina | Yes |
| Seller will only communicate by phone or email and will not meet in person | Gmail and Google Voice only, signed under a mailed power of attorney | Yes |
| Property is for sale below market value | Listed 27% above the most recent same-size Concord land comp, closed within 5% of it | No |
| Seller wants a quick sale, generally under three weeks, and will not negotiate fees | 215 days on market, one price reduction, a negotiated offer below asking | No |
Two out of four. And the two it missed are exactly the two that make a transaction feel wrong. Vacant land with an out-of-state owner describes a large share of legitimate land listings in Middlesex County, and an agent who treated it as a fraud signal on its own would flag most of their pipeline. The signals with teeth, a bargain price and a rushed timeline, were both absent here because the people running it were patient.
This is my argument in one line. A red-flag checklist that depends on a deal feeling wrong will not stop a scheme designed by someone who has read the checklist.
The paperwork was the tell
What would have stopped it was sitting in the file the whole time. The civil complaint, as laid out by the owners’ attorney Richard Vetstein on the Massachusetts Real Estate Law Blog, catalogs what the documents actually looked like:
- A South Carolina driver’s license and a United States passport bearing the identical photograph. Two separate agencies issue those credentials from two separate photo captures. They cannot match.
- A driver’s license missing standard security features and holograms.
- A notary clause left blank in parts, with the Texas county misspelled as “Tourrant” rather than Tarrant.
- A notary signature and stamp that appear to have been lifted off another document and dropped in with a PDF editor.
- Instructions to mail the deed and power of attorney to an apartment in Dallas, Texas, while the seller’s identification said South Carolina.
- Instructions to send a roughly $500,000 proceeds check to a UPS Store in Philadelphia.
- The real owners contacting Concord’s Natural Resources Director to say they had not listed anything.
None of that requires a forensic document examiner. A paralegal with an hour could have called the Tarrant County clerk to confirm the notary commission, or noticed that the license and passport photos were the same file. A South Carolina seller directing original documents to a Dallas apartment and proceeds to a Philadelphia mailbox is three inconsistent states in one transaction.
The Jarakis are suing the buyers, the developer and the attorneys for quiet title, trespass, civil conspiracy and negligence. I am not going to name the agent or the brokerage. They have not been charged with anything, the listing office was a legitimate Massachusetts firm about thirty miles south of the property, and my read is that they were worked the same way the attorneys were. That is the point. Competent people got beaten by a file that looked ordinary.
What owners can actually do, and what it will not do
The free fix is a Registry of Deeds alert. Massachusetts registries run a consumer notification service that emails you whenever a document is recorded against your name, address, or book and page. It costs nothing and takes about five minutes. I want every client who owns land or a paid-off rental signed up for it.
Now the part nobody tells you. This is not one system. Eleven registries share the statewide portal at cns.masslandrecords.com, including Middlesex South, Middlesex North, Suffolk and Worcester. The rest run their own separate sign-ups on their own websites. Norfolk, Plymouth, Barnstable, Essex North, Essex South, Bristol and Fall River each have a different page and a different form. You have to find yours.
Suffolk: Boston, Chelsea, Revere and Winthrop. Uses the statewide portal.
Middlesex South: Concord plus Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Waltham, Arlington, Lexington, Medford, Malden, Everett, Framingham, Natick and about thirty more. Uses the statewide portal.
Middlesex North: Lowell, Billerica, Chelmsford, Dracut, Tewksbury and neighbors. Uses the statewide portal.
Norfolk and Plymouth: Separate sign-up pages on each registry’s own site, not the statewide portal.
Two limits you should know before you treat this as solved. The statewide service caps you at three properties per account and explicitly excludes commercial property. If you own six rentals through an LLC, this tool does not cover you, and that gap falls hardest on exactly the small landlords and investors who are most exposed.
The bigger limit is what the alert is. It fires when a document is recorded, which happens at or just after the closing. The registry’s own disclaimer says plainly that it has a legal duty to record documents even when those documents later turn out to be fraudulent. It will record a forged deed and then email you about it.
Apply that to Concord. The deed recorded in May 2024. An alert would have reached the Jarakis that week instead of in August, when they called about a missing tax bill. Three months of foundation work and a $1.8 million construction loan would not have happened. But the $496,000 was already gone. A registry alert is a smoke alarm, not a lock. Sign up anyway, because finding out in seventy-two hours instead of three months is the difference between a recoverable mess and a framed house on your land.
Who in Greater Boston is exposed
The profile prosecutors describe is specific: vacant, unencumbered, owned by someone out of state. Around here that describes more property than people assume.
One hundred sixty-five land parcels closed in Middlesex County alone in the last two years, at an average price of $831,953. There are currently about 1,300 active land listings across Massachusetts. Every one of those has an owner, and behind them sit thousands of parcels nobody has listed. If you are in one of these situations, you are in the target set:
- You own land in Massachusetts and live somewhere else. This is the single strongest predictor.
- You inherited a parcel or a house and have not transferred, sold or visited it.
- You own a rental free and clear and use a property manager, so no lender and no occupant would notice a title change.
- You hold a second home on the Cape or the islands that sits empty most of the year.
- Your property is held in a trust or an LLC whose registered address is a lawyer’s office rather than a place you read mail.
The common thread is not carelessness. It is distance. Every one of these owners is a person who would not notice a stranger walking the property, and whose only monthly contact with the asset is a tax bill. When the tax bill stops coming, that is the signal, and by then you are already months behind. If you are unsure what your Massachusetts holdings currently show on record, our property value tool is a reasonable starting point, and you can always reach out and I will pull the registry record with you.
What I want from the professionals in the chain
Owners can do one useful thing here. The professionals can do five, and I think we have to. Here is what we run on our side and what I would ask any agent or closing attorney you hire to commit to.
- Treat “here is my new contact information” as a red flag, not a housekeeping note. Mid-transaction, a changed phone number or email address gets verified by calling the last known good number, not the new one just provided. This costs nothing and it breaks the single mechanism every impersonation scheme depends on.
- Mail a confirmation letter to the address on the assessor’s record. The title industry already requires this on vacant land in many shops, and it is the step that would have ended the Concord fraud on day one. Concord’s assessor had the Jarakis’ South Carolina address. A letter to it would have reached them in October 2023, seven months before the closing.
- Verify the notary, not the notarization. Commission records are public. If a deed is notarized in a county you have never heard of, call that county. The Concord file misspelled the county name on the stamp.
- Do a live video call and ask something the file does not contain. A photo matching an uploaded ID proves the person holds a picture. Ask what is across the street from the lot, when they bought it, what they paid. An impersonator working from public records will get the purchase price right and the view wrong.
- Look at where the money and the originals are going. Proceeds to a retail mailbox, originals to a third state, and a seller who never asks about net sheet detail are three things worth pausing over together, even when any one of them has an innocent explanation.
On title insurance, get the coverage right. A standard ALTA Owner’s Policy protects a buyer against forgery that happened before they bought, which is what the Concord developer is relying on now. The ALTA Homeowner’s Policy adds post-policy forgery coverage, protecting you against someone fraudulently transferring your property after you own it, and there is an endorsement, ALTA 49.1, that extends similar protection to an existing owner who has paid off the mortgage. Read the fine print on the Homeowner’s Policy though. It is available only for improved one to four family residential property, which means the product with the best post-closing forgery protection does not cover vacant land. The asset class the scheme targets is the one the coverage excludes.
The honest summary
Massachusetts owners reported $46,269,818 in real estate fraud losses to the FBI between 2019 and 2023 across 1,576 victims, the largest total in the FBI’s Boston Division, which also covers Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Regionally that is 2,301 victims and more than $61.5 million.
One caveat on those numbers, because the coverage usually drops it. The FBI says outright that its complaint center does not keep statistics specifically for deed fraud. Those figures are the whole real estate fraud category, which includes wire fraud at closing and rental scams. Deed fraud is a subset. The Bureau also says reported losses are almost certainly low, because many owners do not know where to report it or have not discovered the theft yet. The real number is unknowable, and both of those adjustments point in opposite directions, so treat $46 million as the scale of the problem rather than a precise count of stolen deeds.
What is not ambiguous is how this one worked. It did not beat a homeowner. It beat a licensed agent, a live MLS listing, two attorneys and a closing, using a price that matched the comps and a timeline that matched the average. Reading your deed carefully was never going to catch it.
Sign up for your registry’s alert this week. It takes five minutes and it is free. Then, the next time you sell anything, ask your attorney and your agent what they do to confirm a seller is who they say they are when nobody in the deal has ever met them in person. If the answer is that they look at a copy of a driver’s license, you already know how that goes.
We work with sellers, landlords and land owners across Greater Boston, and title questions like this one come up more often than they used to. If you own something you have not looked at in a while and want a second set of eyes on the record, get in touch. No charge and no pitch.
Sources
- U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts: Three Men Charged in $1.5 Million Deed Fraud and Money Laundering Schemes, July 23, 2026
- FBI Boston: Quit Claim Deed Fraud is on the Rise, April 1, 2025
- American Land Title Association: FBI Boston Issues Quit Claim Deed Fraud Warning, with the state by state loss breakdown
- ALTA: Combating Seller Impersonation Fraud and Benefits of ALTA’s Homeowner’s Policy of Title Insurance
- Boston.com: New court docs reveal how scammers allegedly impersonated Concord landowners, July 24, 2026
- CBS Boston: 3 charged after Concord, Massachusetts land stolen, sold to unsuspecting buyer in 2024
- Massachusetts Real Estate Law Blog (Richard D. Vetstein): the Concord title theft case and the civil complaint
- Secretary of the Commonwealth: Protect Your Home, registry consumer alert sign-ups by county
- Massachusetts Consumer Notification Service (statewide portal, participating registries and terms)
- Fall River Reporter: full text of the Department of Justice announcement, July 23, 2026
- MLS PIN closed sale records for Concord land and Mattison Drive single family homes, queried directly September 15, 2026 (proprietary)
