The West Saint Mark Church of Christ in Chapel Hill, N.C., has been developing property for a new building over the past two decades. Those plans nearly stalled when Pastor Timothy Peppers got a call from a Secret Service agent in March 2026.
West Saint Mark Church of Christ / Video screenshot @ ABC11
Peppers’ father bought the land in the 1960s, planning to build a church there. Peppers now owns the property and has continued his father’s plans to develop it as the church’s future home. Peppers told MinistryWatch in an emailed statement that the agent asked whether he was in the process of selling his land because the property was on a list scammers were using to target victims. Peppers said he had no such sale underway. One month later, he received a document showing his property had been sold for $110,000 without his knowledge and bearing his falsified initials.
“I was furious,” Peppers told MinistryWatch.
He went to the Orange County Register of Deeds and found that his property had been deeded to the buyer named in the document. “I was thinking about how big a mess it would have been had we gone through the permitting process, ready to build, and someone walked up and said they owned the property,” Peppers told ABC11 in a separate interview.
In June 2026, the FBI warned that criminals were using owner impersonation to carry out illegal property sales. Criminals may use fake IDs and voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone numbers to impersonate property owners. They gather information through county and state websites and data brokers, then contact real estate agents and title companies while posing as the property owner, drafting contracts to sell it. Once they have a buyer, they ask that the money be sent to a co-conspirator attorney in another state.
In the case of Peppers’ property, the alleged scammer was in the process of selling it to a development company. The Orange County Register of Deeds rescinded the deed from the development company, and the company’s bank blocked the $110,000 wire transfer before it went through. However, the fraudulent deed itself has not been revoked — that requires a court order signed by a judge. If the company’s attorney does not obtain that order, Peppers may have to pay legal fees and seek it himself.
imothy Peppers, pastor of West Saint Mark Church of Christ / Video screenshot @ ABC11
Peppers said the scammer used a real estate listing on Zillow and an electronic filing with the Register of Deeds office to carry out the alleged crime. Peppers said he spoke with the man by phone. Asked whether the alleged scammer knew the property he was stealing was intended for a church, Peppers said he didn’t think the person knew, but added that the scammer was “highly motivated by opportunistic greed. It would not have mattered if he was aware.”
MinistryWatch contacted the Secret Service and Orange County Sheriff’s Office and was not able to verify the scammer’s identity or confirm whether charges have been filed.
West Saint Mark Church of Christ is not alone — deed theft is happening nationwide.
In 2024, a Texas pastor was found guilty of stealing three church properties by filing fraudulent deeds.
In another case, the pastor of Gospel Assembly Queens Church in New York, Marc T. Pierre, found his church in trouble after he tried to refinance its mortgage in 2018. At the time, he signed several documents, one of which transferred the deed to a company called Yonatan Funding LLC. Pierre believes the document was misrepresented to him by an attorney for the company. He is now involved in a lawsuit to get the deed back.
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Yonatan has made multiple attempts to evict the church, but it remains open for now. Pierre says that’s because of the support it provides to the community. “Thank God it is a 501(c)(3) organization. That’s what has been helping us,” Pierre told MinistryWatch in a phone interview.
Deed theft in New York is so prevalent that one resident, Evangeline Byers, founded the People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft. She said many others in the Queens area — including another church — have faced similar situations. “We are fighting back against it,” Byers told MinistryWatch in a phone interview. The organization organizes petitions, protests and grassroots lobbying campaigns to draw attention to deed theft in the state.
More than 3,500 deed theft complaints were filed in New York City, mainly in Brooklyn and Queens, between 2013 and 2023. There were 517 complaints registered in 2025 alone — more than three times the number recorded in 2023. In April, New York Attorney General Letitia James said, “We are witnessing a disturbing rise in the number of housing scams, particularly scams like deed theft, that target Black and Brown neighborhoods, homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods … They exploit the complexity of our legal system to kick families out of their homes and communities.”
In 2025, the FBI released a warning that home title fraud was increasing. An FBI report found that 58,141 victims reported $1.3 billion in losses related to real estate fraud from 2019 to 2023. The FBI’s 2025 report counted 12,368 cases of real estate fraud, up by more than 3,000 from the previous year.
“Reported losses are most likely much higher due to the fact that many don’t know where to report it, are embarrassed, or haven’t yet realized they have been scammed,” the FBI’s title fraud warning says.
For those who want to protect their churches or property, most county deed offices in the U.S. have fraud alert systems available. Experts recommend regularly monitoring property records for unfamiliar filings and working with well-established, trustworthy legal, financial and title professionals when navigating property dealings.
Obtaining title insurance may also be a prudent decision. The FBI recommends reviewing “title insurance policy coverage and checking for post-policy protection,” noting that “standard owners’ policies may provide protection against forgery and may cover the legal costs required to clear your title and restore rightful ownership.” The agency also advises that “when purchasing, send a certified letter to the address of record on the land tax record to verify legitimacy of seller.” Crimes may be reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov.
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