Earlier this week, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough sued to dam a foreclosures sale of Graceland, CNN has reported. In accordance with Keough’s swimsuit, paperwork that purport to point out the Memphis house was collateral for a mortgage taken out by Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s sole inheritor and Keough’s mom, are fraudulent: “Lisa Marie Presley by no means borrowed cash from Naussany Investments and by no means gave a deed of belief encumbering Graceland as safety.” The foreclosures sale, which has been briefly halted, was scheduled for later this week and seems to be a case of deed theft, with an LLC named Naussany Investments & Non-public Lending trying to benefit from Lisa Marie’s demise early final yr.

Older owners are sometimes the targets of deed theft however typically not superstar owners with attorneys on retainer. The swindle regularly includes somebody promising to repay the mortgage in alternate for the proprietor signing over the home at a fire-sale worth. (The individuals behind this kind of fraud are likely to go after older owners of shade, usually in quickly gentrifying neighborhoods, who could also be home wealthy however money poor.) As quickly as paperwork are signed and the deed is filed with the town, the “purchaser” disappears and the proprietor is left with their debt however no home. Some scammers take a extra direct route, submitting solid paperwork straight with the town and banking on the truth that nobody will discover till it’s too late.

As CNN reported, final yr an LLC (Naussany Investments & Non-public Lending) introduced paperwork “purporting to point out that Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed $3.8 million from Naussany Investments” utilizing Graceland as safety. However Keough’s attorneys declare the paperwork are fraudulent, that Lisa Marie by no means borrowed the cash or put the well-known house up as collateral. There’s much more at stake than $3.8 million: Graceland is the second-most-visited house within the U.S. after the White Home and makes up an enormous chunk of Elvis’s property, which is alleged to be value a whole lot of tens of millions. Lisa Marie’s 2022 divorce filings present she earned seven figures from it yearly.

A Florida notary whose identify is on the mortgage paperwork stated she “by no means met Lisa Marie Presley nor notarized any doc for her,” in line with courtroom paperwork cited by the information web site, which was not in a position to contact the corporate. An e-mail message to the LLC acquired an auto-reply that nobody can be within the workplace for the subsequent week, the cellphone quantity was out of service, and the state of Missouri, the place Nassany is allegedly situated, has no document of such a enterprise. Keough’s attorneys declare the corporate doesn’t exist.

Elvis Presley Enterprises, which manages the Presley property, additionally referred to as the foreclosures a con. “Elvis Presley Enterprises can verify that these claims are fraudulent,” the corporate stated in an announcement to CNN. “There isn’t any foreclosures sale. Merely put, the counter lawsuit that has been filed is to cease the fraud.”

Deed theft is reportedly on the rise, with its practitioners, usually LLCs which might be tough to prosecute, rising more and more brazen. Just a few years in the past, The New York Instances reported on a landlord who had constructed a real-estate empire by allegedly stealing a minimum of 17 properties, in line with prosecutors and owners (he even collected lease cash from metropolis businesses at a number of of them, by housing-subsidy applications). Extra not too long ago, a grifter managed to briefly take possession of the New Yorker Resort in midtown. After staying an evening within the resort, he used an obscure housing regulation and a courtroom judgment in his favor to persuade the town’s finance division to switch the deed to his identify. However the try and seize Graceland stands out as the ballsiest, highest-profile try to date. If solely everybody had the Elvis property’s attorneys on their facet.