| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 19, 2026Contact: Nicole Kiprilov, 347-409-4635 press@sarithafornewyork.com Complaints to The Attorney General’s Office Have Risen Nearly Five-Fold Since James Launched Her ‘Deed Theft Initiative’ |
| Brooklyn, NY — Crime-fighting New York State attorney general candidate Saritha Komatireddy, who will lock up repeat offenders, create residential facilities for the mentally ill homeless, and root out fraud, met with Black homeowners in Brooklyn who have watched deed theft spread through their blocks, and pledged to put the Attorney General’s Organized Crime Task Force on deed theft rings on day one. Complaints of deed theft to the Attorney General’s office have climbed from 106 in 2020, the year Letitia James announced her initiative against it, to 517 last year, nearly five times as many. They have more than tripled since 2023 alone. “Someone walks into a clerk’s office with a forged signature and walks out owning your house,” Ms. Komatireddy said. “These are not one-offs. These criminals are organized. The homeowners I have sat with over the course of this campaign did everything they were told to do. They worked. They saved. They invested in a home. Some of them paid off a mortgage over 30 years. And a stranger took the house with a pen under this attorney general.” Ms. Komatireddy pointed to the case of Sanford Solny, the disbarred Brooklyn attorney whose companies were linked to roughly 140 properties over a decade and who was accused by forty homeowners in civil and criminal court. Mr. Solny pleaded guilty in Queens in 2018 to stealing ten homes and was sentenced to probation and a fine. No jail. He went on taking houses for years afterward. Even after Mr. Solny’s conviction in Brooklyn last year, when he was sentenced to 2 ½ to 7 years in prison, he was granted release on bail after 5 months, and the victims were denied restitution, so Solny was permitted to keep the nearly $500,000 in rent he had collected from stolen homes. “A man admits in open court that he stole ten families’ homes and he walks out the door with probation,” Ms. Komatireddy said. “Then he does it again, and again, and even when a district attorney, not the Attorney General, finally puts him in a cell, he gets a slap on the wrist and is allowed to keep the profits of his crimes. That is the system Letitia James has been running.” Ms. James co-authored the 2023 law that let her office halt evictions in deed theft cases and move to void forged deeds, and the 2024 law that made deed theft a form of grand larceny and handed her office original criminal jurisdiction to prosecute it alongside district attorneys. She asked for the tools. She got all of them. Complaints have more than tripled since. “When these cases go civil, the thieves treat the penalty as a cost of doing business,” Ms. Komatireddy said. “They settle, they dissolve the LLC, they open a new one on Monday. I spent my career putting people in prison. That is what changes behavior.” As Attorney General, Ms. Komatireddy will: Put the Organized Crime Task Force on deed theft. The Attorney General has had a statewide Organized Crime Task Force since 1970, with wiretap authority, subpoena power and forensic accountants, built for criminal operations that run across county lines. Deed theft rings run across Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. The Task Force will work alongside the office’s real estate enforcement lawyers to build pattern cases against the crews, the shell companies and the money, not one house at a time. Create a criminal Deed Theft Unit staffed with career prosecutors and investigators, housed in the criminal division, charged with bringing felony cases rather than civil settlements against the people and companies stealing homes. Give victims their day in court. The State Senate passed a bill in June, 55 to 6, that would revive deed theft claims now barred by the statute of limitations and move them to the front of the calendar. It has sat in the Assembly Judiciary Committee ever since. Ms. Komatireddy calls on the Assembly to pass it. She will also push to extend the criminal discovery window from two years to five, because most families do not learn their house is gone until long after the paperwork was filed. Audit the Homeowner Protection Program. HOPP exists to keep families in their homes. Twenty-five executives at three HOPP-funded nonprofits cleared $350,000 last year, one chief executive took more than $2 million, and the program has not published a performance report since 2015. Ms. Komatireddy will audit the program, cap administrative overhead, publish the results every year, and move the money into direct legal representation for homeowners. Prosecute the professionals who make it possible. Deed theft does not work without a notary, an attorney or a title agent somewhere in the chain. Those cases will be charged and every license will be referred. Put a free title-alert system in front of every homeowner in New York, working with county clerks statewide, so a homeowner learns within days that a document has been filed against their property rather than when the eviction notice arrives. “The people in that room this morning were not asking for a study. They were asking for someone to go arrest the people doing this,” Ms. Komatireddy said. “As your next Attorney General, I will.” If New York isn’t safe, nothing else matters. |
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