How to Steal a House — From the Man Who Did It

Property confiscation, higher taxes, new homeless encampments, all of these are the hallmarks of good socialist government. And that's what New Yorkers are getting good and hard lately under the Zoran Mamdani administration. A new rental ripoff report just dropped in New York. It's putting together all of the elements for a total housing disaster zone. We'll dive into the craziest parts and we'll explain why these policies are doomed to fail. Zoran Mamdani continues his communistic takeover of New York City. According to the New York Post, he has now laid out a 68-page report focusing on what he calls an ambitious slate of tenant-focused proposals, including legally recognizing tenant unions, directing housing preservation and development to investigate every heat complaint citywide, and requiring landlords to disclose any AI-generated or digitally altered images and videos in rental listings so applicants are not misled by doctored apartments. The biggest thing that he wants to do is that he wants to make the people who are screening, potential renters, by law, pay for the professional credit report or criminal background check or eviction history report. He says, well, you know, it's an insurmountable barrier for rent-burdened tenants to actually pay for those reports. I mean, this is incredibly stupid because, of course, what's going to end up happening is that if you cost shift that stuff onto the person who's doing the rent, that person is going to shift that back onto the renter by increasing the rent. If you ban them from increasing the rent, then they're just going to stop building new units. They're going to get out of business. If you withdraw the entire profit margin in building new apartments, no one will build a new apartment, which is exactly what's going to happen. Every single thing that Mamdani is doing right now is designed to actually drive up the price of rent. He will maintain the price of rent for some people and it will rise for everyone else or the apartments will just go by the wayside in terms of upkeep and all of the rest. All of this is rube bait, but it's rube bait rooted in the idea that essentially everybody who owns an apartment complex or manages an apartment complex has a Scrooge McDuck bank in the back of their house and he just goes swimming around in the gold every night. It's incredibly stupid. Incredibly stupid stuff. By the way, if you can't do a background check or eviction history on all your tenants because it's too expensive and they prevent you from raising the rents, you know what you're actually going to do? You're just going to only offer rent to people who are willing to put all the money down up front because that way you have collateral to seize. You have something to seize. But of course, this sort of stuff, I guess, is popular in in newfound communist centers like New York. Tony Marrero of the Hope Tenants Union is touting an end to the quote unquote violence of evictions. And these are crazy people. I'm sorry. These people are crazy. This person is wearing a full face covering in the year 2026 flanked by the smarm master himself, Zoran Mamdani, who has that grin plastered on his face like he's something out of the horror movie Smile. And here you have this crazy lady wearing an N95 in 2026, along with her fishing hat with buttons on it. These are the people making policy. Our city is turning the corner on tenant power. When we organize, we win results. The Mamdani administration is emboldening us so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions as a matter of business as usual. She says she was wearing that because of all the smog from the Canadian wildfires. Weird. No one else in the room is wearing one. But in any case, the New York City dramatic dysfunction is a result of communistic governance. Of course, of course. Apparently, NYCHA plumber supervisor Jacob Markowski earned four hundred sixty five thousand dollars from July 2024 through June 2025. That is more than the mayor and the city council speaker make combined. The NYCHA is the New York City Housing Authority and the plumbers and everybody else there. They're just making bank. Absolute bank. Seventy of the employees of the New York City Housing Administration have been charged with bribery and extortion in 2024. They're collecting less rent. Many of the families are unemployed. Essentially, you just keep driving up the prices. That is what is happening here. But the real goal here in the end is a socialistic government takeover of the means of production. It's been made very clear. You may recall the New York City housing director, Sia Weaver, talking about property as a collective good. I think the reality is, is that for centuries we've really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And we are going to end transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have. This is what they want, a different relationship to property. The government's going to tell you what you can own and how you can own all of it. Here's the thing. Americans generally do not like this stuff. They don't. Sixty eight percent of Democrats, according to the latest Harvard Harris poll, 68 percent of Democrats prefer free enterprise to socialism. Overall, 78 percent of Americans believe that we are better off with free enterprise than we are with socialism. And when it comes to the meritocracy, it turns out that overall, 88 percent of Americans believe in a system rooted in merit and work, as opposed to 12 percent believing that everybody should get the same regardless of the work they do. Even 86 percent of Democrats believe in a system that allows you to earn whatever you can based on your merit and your work. So what exactly do the propagandists have to do? To tell you that neither of those things is possible, there can't be a merit and work based system and that free enterprise systems are actually bad. And also to tell you one other thing, socialism isn't actually what you see in, say, China or Cuba or Venezuela or the Soviet Union. Socialism is the extremely capitalistic system of Denmark because Denmark has universal health care. That is not correct. Denmark is a capitalist system with a bunch of significant social welfare programs. It's what we used to call a mixed economy, obviously. But this is why if you just deliberately confuse people. If you say socialism means universal health care plus capitalism, people like, oh, it doesn't sound so bad. If you never define the term, you can make it sound better than it is. And that is why that same Harvard-Harris poll says that three in five people in America believe that under socialism you can own your own home. Same thing, by the way, six in 10 Americans believe that you that you can own your own business under socialism. OK, what you're talking about now is not socialism. What you're talking about now is essentially state capitalism or mercantilism or economic fascism. It's a different thing. So the left always has to lie about what it is they are attempting to do. Now, this comes along with a broader worldview for the left in which I mean, again, the hard left worldview is that, yes, you should get the same result no matter what you do. Meritocracy work. These are irrelevant and they're stupid. And that manifests, by the way, in being extraordinarily soft on crime. Bunch of stories now coming out that are pretty horrifying on Democrats being incredibly soft on crime. So, for example, it turns out that this week the Department of Homeland Security removed a convicted child rapist who was actually pardoned by Tim Walz. That person's name was Thu Lu Vang, an illegal alien from Laos who'd been convicted in 2006 of first degree criminal sexual conduct after repeatedly assaulting a girl between 2002 and 2004 when she was 10. Well, Walz then offered that guy a pardon and he said, we can't be judged by our worst day. This is where Democrats are. I mean, this is just I'm sorry, this is now just pure Bane in Dark Knight Rises stuff here. Did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable? Did it improve the idea that we can't all be judged by our worst day? And I want to be very clear. These are horrific crimes. They often are. They're horrific crimes, but we can't be judged by our worst day. No, I think that's actually the purpose of criminal law is to judge you by your worst day. Or at least to prevent you from having another worst day. Zarmandani is so is so crazy about this stuff. He actually went to Rikers to watch the World Cup. This is where we are now. We literally just went to Rikers to watch the World Cup with a bunch of inmates with the smarmy grin. People were incarcerated here on Rikers that they too are a part of New York City. The World Cup has been a magical moment for the entire city. These are New Yorkers and they will be New Yorkers when they get out of Rikers. They're New Yorkers today. And I wanted to make sure that we could celebrate this moment together. Celebrate the moment with the with the rapists and the predators in Rikers. This is this is insane. This is insane. And if that continues in the United States, we are going to have the end of the country on our hands if that ideology continues to percolate and grow. And again, it's percolating and growing in part thanks to domestic concerns, but not insignificantly thanks to the help of our of our foreign enemies. Now, speaking of crime and getting away with it, with the opportunity yesterday to sit down with a man who got away with crime for like solidly a decade. Joining me online is Matthew Cox. Matthew is a former fraudster turned writer, podcaster and consumer protection advocate. He's actually once on the U.S. Secret Service's most wanted list for title theft and mortgage fraud. And then he did 12 years in prison before rebuilding his life. And today he uses that experience to educate people like us on the realities of these crimes and how to protect ourselves. Matthew, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Yep. Thank you for having me. So why don't we start by kind of explaining what the kind of crimes that you were convicted of, what kind of crimes did you participate in? How easy was it to get away with them? So home title theft is basically transferring the title to someone's house or maybe assuming someone's name and then borrowing money against the house. A lot of people think it's not possible, but it happens all the time. It's happening more and more as time goes on. It's happening a lot more now than when I was doing it. It's a very easy crime. It's becoming easier all the time, simply because everything is done online at this point. When I was doing the crime, committing this crime, I actually had to physically go down to public records. I had to pull your title. I had to create the documents, go back to public records. I had to go into the bank. I had to go to the title company for the closings. All of that can be done sitting in your local coffee shop on their Wi-Fi using a cheap computer purchased over the internet. So it's very easy now to commit this crime. Now, I mean, I think most of us kind of assume because we're just used to the idea of trust and verification that there is some sort of authentication process that happens here. Is there any authenticating these records when they're filed? Is there anybody checking to make sure this doesn't happen? No, no, that's what makes it so, you know, from the standpoint of a title thief, that's what makes it such a great crime, right? Nobody is looking. Nobody's calling to verify. Anything filed in public records, as long as you check all the boxes, it has to be filed. So even if, let's say, the clerk thought, you know, this document doesn't quite look right, but they checked all the boxes, they have to record it. They're not allowed to call the bank and say, is this satisfaction of mortgage correct? Did you guys send this to us? They're not allowed to call the homeowner and say, did you just sell your house or transfer the title, whatever the case may be. They're not really legally allowed to do that. So that's kind of incredible, obviously, because I think that when we think about our biggest assets, when it comes to your home, obviously, that's where for a huge percentage of the population, most of their wealth actually lies. The idea that somebody can just go falsify the record, nobody checks it, and then all the money just gets taken out. I mean, that's the question. Once the property title was put in your name, because you did this, what would you typically do with it? So this is the thing. It depends on the house, right? Like if I've refinanced houses in the homeowner's name while the homeowner was living in the house, and even when they had a lien on it, what I did was, I'll give you one example. I drove by the house, got the guy's name. I created a fake appraisal saying, of course, he owned the house and the house was worth several hundred thousand dollars. I then went to several banks. I created a fake ID in his name, used a stolen social security number, and then went to the bank. Because the property was paid for free and clear, I actually satisfied the lien on the property. Because it was paid for free and clear, the bank was willing to lend me money, even though the credit had no credit, even though the owner had no credit because I was using a stolen social security number. And I got several banks to lend me money on that home at the same time. And when the authorities found out about it, they actually showed up and dragged the homeowner downtown and questioned him for four or five hours because they believed he was involved in the crime. That's just one example. I've also rented houses from people and, in their name, borrowed money against the home. I have also rented houses. I've also convinced homeowners to owner finance their homes or just outright bought the house and then borrowed money against it. I mean, it's a crime that you're just not really safe. That's what I'm trying to get at. People think, oh, I'm safe. A lot of people will think that they have a mortgage on their house. Let's say your house is worth half a million dollars and you have a mortgage for, I don't know, $490,000. And you think, oh, I'm safe. I really don't have any equity for anybody to steal. That's irrelevant. I can simply create a satisfaction of mortgage from your title or from your mortgage company, file it downtown, and your mortgage disappears. And I can now borrow against that false equity in your house. So if you're the homeowner and this happens to you, when do you first find out that this has actually happened to you? Because, again, most of the time when somebody commits a crime against you, a physical crime, you're on the scene. It happens to you. You know about it. You report it. And the reaction is fast. But it took a while for the police to catch up with you. Because how long does it take for homeowners to actually find out that they've been the victim? It could be months, months. And I'm long gone, by the way. I've borrowed half a million, a million. I borrowed $1.3 million against a piece of property. And then by the time the homeowner is notified, I've already pulled the money out of the bank and I'm gone. It could be months. As long as I continue to pay those mortgages, you may never be notified until eventually you just stop paying and then you start getting foreclosure notices. So it's a long time. Unfortunately, it's a very safe crime for the perspective of the thief. How long were you able to get away with this before you were finally caught? And how were you caught? I want to say the U.S. attorney said I did it for a decade. I think that's a little bit longer than I actually did. Probably, let's say, seven or eight years. I was also on the run once they caught up with me. I went on the run for three years and borrowed another $3.5 million while on the run. Listen, I know it's horrible. I understand. It's funny because for me, it was so long ago. And now I was actually in prison and I used to watch the infomercial for Home Title Lock. And I used to think, wow, I would love to contact them because I noticed that nobody, no title thieves wanted to come on and talk about this. And I thought, the reason this exists is because people don't believe it's possible. And that's a problem. They're not looking out for themselves. They're not monitoring their title. And that is the main issue. They're not monitoring their title. And then even if they're notified by the police, what do you do then? I mean, you're not a lawyer. The average person is not a real estate attorney. They don't have $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to hire a real estate attorney. And if you have a company like Home Title Lock, then they'll monitor the title. Once they notify you and you explain, yeah, no, I did not do that, they become an advocate for you and they will actually correct the problem for you. And so that's really kind of why I'm doing this. Well, it's an amazing story and a horrifying story for a lot of people who have never suspected this could happen to them. It's one of the reasons we partner with Home Title Lock to make sure our audience has the opportunity to find out today. If you're a victim of this silent and growing crime, head on over to hometitlelock.com. Use promo code Ben to get a free title history report from Home Title Lock. They're also going to give you a free trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection to give you that peace of mind. That's hometitlelock.com, promo code Ben for a free peace of mind. Matthew Cox, thanks so much for taking the time and for giving us that information. Really important stuff. Thank you. Thanks for having me. What an amazing video you just watched. Wasn't that amazing? Well, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to watch the full show ad-free. Or check out this crazy story here.