Screwjob Report #1

From "Brutally Honest on ShockNet" from 05/23/09.

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Well tonight for the very first Screwjob Report, I have a special case for you, and it’s something that you really need to pay attention to if you own property.

This comes courtesy of WFAA in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. Apparently there has been a HUGE surge in property deals in Tarrant County. Hundreds of deals have been made, many of them going to a company called SKF Unlimited, who then sells the mineral rights to those properties over to gas companies.

The problem is that many of these sales are apparently fraudulent.

You see, in Tarrant County apparently all you need is a piece of paper, two signatures, and a notary stamp, and the deal is made. And nobody in the country government ever bothers to check the signatures.

So, in other words, if you own a plot of land in that county, I could cobble up a piece of paper that claims that you sold that land to me for ten dollars, forge your signature next to my own, add a notary stamp, and file it with Tarrant County and it would be legal as far as the county is concerned. And then I could sell it over to SKF Unlimited for market price, they turn around and sell the mineral rights to a gas company, and everybody makes money except for YOU because you have no idea that this was going on.

That is PRECISELY what happened to approximately 400 landowners in Tarrant County supposedly by a woman named either “Mary Rodriguiez” or “Maria Gomez”. Both women supposedly live in Miami, but police now suspect that the woman or women may not even exist.

And of course, the original landowners are finding out that their land has been sold right out from under them. SO not only are they deprived of their property, but they are also deprived of the money that they COULD have made from the mineral rights sold to the gas company through SKF Unlimited.

Nice, huh?

This all started to come out after a guy by the name of Hector Macias tried to sell his property and the real estate agent found out that it was ALREADY sold to “Mary Rodriguez”, who then sold it to SKF Unlimited, who then sold the mineral rights to a gas company, and they came in and already stripped the land.

Now… the owner of SKF Unlimited says that he’s a victim in all of this. He says that Mary Rodrigues and Maria Gomez are real, that they’re sisters, and they supposedly owe him thousands of dollars. BUT he can’t say where either of them are because he lost contact with them. Isn’t that convenient?

Funny too… that he would be the only person who knows that they do exist. They’re supposedly flight attendants, but no mention of what airline. They come to Fort Worth to flip houses, but no real estate agency has ever heard of those names before. And yet they’re making land deals and securing mortgages, and nobody knows who they are… EXCEPT for the owner of SKF Unlimited… and according to WFAA reporter Jim Douglas, he’s gotta speak with his attorney before he can say anything more about them.

But there is another party involved that is just as culpable for this rampant screwjob that NOBODY wants to talk about… and that’s the Tarrant County Clerk’s office!

Now I don’t know what the rule is in Texas, but here in Georgia, all notaries are numbered and can be tracked back to a specific person. I know this because my mother used to be a city clerk as well as an official notary. So who was the notary in these transactions? Can it be traced? And if not, why not?

So if the County Clerk’s office is registering these documents without verifying who the notary is and whether or not the signatures are not fakes… which according to some of the documents presented DO look like they were all from the same person… wouldn’t that make the County Clerk’s office accomplices to the theft? After all, the whole purpose of the notary system is to validate the signatures. And if they are processing thousands of documents a day without doing even a mild fact-check, wouldn’t that be considered a serious problem for the county?

You know what? If they were held financially accountable for the veracity of these transactions, I’m sure they’d be double-and-triple-checking those documents. BUT of course we can’t TOUCH the government, can we? No, they’re “special”. They’re protected by sovereign immunity. That office needs to be thoroughly investigated because something is inherently wrong there to have that many transactions go through without any kind of accountability.

Now here’s the problem: for many of these 400 or so landowners who HAD their property literally STOLEN out from under them, it will take each of them several months and several THOUSAND dollars out of their pockets to sort out this whole mess before they get their property back. Several months and several THOUSAND dollars out of their own pocket to reclaim land that was STOLEN from them, and that may or may not include getting the compensation for the mineral rights that were signed over after the fraud was committed.

And guess who would be responsible for SOME of those delays and costs? Yeah, the very county government that facilitated the theft. They can facilitate a felony fraud in a matter of hours, but you gotta go through hell and back with the very facilitators to fix the problem.

THAT, my friends, is a SCREWJOB if there ever was one.