by Kate Shunney
A Morgan County real estate agent tipped off a Maryland man that a property he’s owned in Great Cacapon for 40 years had been put up for sale, alerting him to what turned out to be an attempted real estate fraud.
Marlin Strand, who has owned his place on Rouse Mountain since 1983, said a person pretending to be him and using falsified ID documents had listed his property for sale on MLS – the online real estate listing service – and was setting up showings of the property through an agent in Martinsburg when Rick Kucharski noticed the listing.
Strand said Kucharski contacted him and asked about him selling the property, as the two knew each other from the area and previous dealings. 
Strand didn’t know anything about the listing, and definitely was not selling his property, and quickly dug in to see what was going on.
“They almost sold the property out from under me,” Strand said of the individuals who falsified documents to claim they owned it.
As he described it, the listing and communication about the property was all handle by text message.
When Kucharski called Strand to ask if he was selling and found out he had no knowledge of the listing, they went to the listing agent.
The female agent in Martinsburg told them that Marlin Strand was supposed to meet her to show her the property. Strand assured her he had not set up that meeting. That’s when she became aware that the listing was fraudulent, and the people behind it had falsified Maryland IDs and documents to make it look like they represented Strand in the transaction.
“It was really the connection with Rick that saved my property,” Strand said.
The agent in Martinsburg told them that when she pulled the property listing off MLS, the party that had asked her to list it became belligerent over text.
Strand contacted the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department and got help from Chief Johnnie Walter, who said this isn’t the first case of real estate fraud he’s seen here.
“We’ve had several of those,” said Walter. “It’s a nationwide problem. People are doing this all through the internet.”
In one recent case investigated by the Sheriff’s Department, the owner of the property was alerted to the fraudulent sale of his land when he received legal documents in the mail from Trump & Trump.
“If they wouldn’t have mailed documents to his house, it would have gone through,” said Walter.
The real danger, Strand pointed out, is that a property transaction can happen without any of the parties – the buyers, sellers or agents – meeting anyone in person.
He wanted to warn others to beware of the possibility of this kind of fraud, “because we work so much in the virtual environment” where business can be done without a face-to-face interaction.
Walter echoed his warning, saying in-person transactions are the best protection against this kind of fraud. He also pointed out that their investigations sometimes point to a foreign internet IP address as the source of the fraudulent property communications.
Fraudsters can provide a U.S. bank account for money transactions, but that money can be moved immediately into international accounts, which makes it very difficult to get money back.
“Once it leaves this jurisdiction, we can’t really touch it,” said Walter.
