We had a deal happen to us that I have never heard before, and haven't since, but there must be someone, somewhere, who has had this happen in some form. In 1981, we bought a mobile home on credit, and lived on a rented lot with it. In 1983, we paid off the mobile home and bought acreage (12 acres) of our own to put the now paid off mobile home on. We drilled a well, and put in a septic and everything was fine. We bought the land on a 5 year land contract. When we paid the land off, we built a house, then sold the mobile home. We accomplished this by Thanksgiving, 1989. Things were going pretty well, as we built our home piece by piece, with no mortgage, so when we moved into the house on Thanksgiving, 1989, we had no bills, no mortgage. Our dream come true. Two years (almost) later, a car drove up into our yard, a woman got out, and started stapling something to our trees. It was a Sheriff's Sale sign. Actually, she had several to put on several trees along the road frontage of our property. My husband went out to ask her what she was doing, and she told us that our property was being auctioned off for failure to pay our mortgage, and she handed us (by now I was there, too) a bunch of forms on how we had been taken to court for foreclosure, and that a sale would be taking place. My husband, normally a very calm individual, was not so calm in explaining to her that she had the wrong property. And she pulled out photographs. "Is this your home?" Well, yes it was. She had several photos of our house in her possession. My husband explained that we did not have a mortgage, so it couldn't possibly be delinquent. Then she asked our names. Well, her "owners" names and ours weren't even close to sounding alike. So, she asked, are you renting this from "XXXXX"?. No, we own it. Did you buy this from "XXXXXX". No, never heard of "XXXXX". In the meantime, I ran up into the house, and got our deed, and the release we received from the court house when we paid off our land contract. Well, upon seeing these items, the woman burst into tears, squeaking in between sobs about her losing her job. Here is what we found out happened after it was all straightened out: Our property is in Pennsylvania. Some "un-named" individual applied for a mortgage from some big banking outfit in the MidWest. They used pictures of our brand-new house, and apparently a "drive-by" appraisal method, gave them over $100,000 in mortgage money, and of course, the individual walked away without making a payment. Of course, since the names were different, and we had no recorded mortgage in the courthouse, the "title" for the individual came up clean, and there were no liens on the property address. (you'd think someone in the title company would have pulled the actual deed, but....nope). The woman, still crying, took down her sheriff signs, and took our name and telephone number, and we, of course, got hers. It took about a month to straighten out the mess. My husband and I travel, sometimes 2 or 3 months at a time, what if we hadn't been there? They would have auctioned off our home and all our possessions. I don't know how to protect yourself from this, but, like someone else's post....if you see someone taking pictures of your home, you'd better find out why. And, if you travel like we do, make friends with a neighbor who can check on your home once in awhile, and has your cell phone number.