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Leviathant t1_jcn9m6d wrote

There are definitely companies that have automation around things like the recording of new deeds. The kind of personal information that you could only easily dig up if you worked at a collections agency is now... just on the internet. Google yourself and your phone number, and you'll find a page with all your old addresses and phone numbers, your family, all scraped from public sources or lists that got hacked and shared.

I just like to blame the bank and the real estate agency. "Just initial all these pages and sign this, this, and this." Who's going to look for marketing language in all those documents?

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WhyNotKenGaburo OP t1_jcnhnxo wrote

Yeah, I'm pretty diligent about tying to scrub my personal info from the web as much as I can. Those sites you mention really don't have much on me. I did review all of my sales documents thoroughly, and had the lawyer that oversaw the sale of my apartment in NYC go over them as well (NY is a lawyer state, which I think is good), and there wasn't any clause that stated that my information would be given out left and right. It just seems odd to me that I would go from having 3-5 calls a year in NY to 3-5 calls a day in PA.

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ronreadingpa t1_jcpxu2p wrote

Deeds and liens (ie. mortgage, home equity loan, etc) is public information. There are many companies that monitor public records and pounce soon as they detect a change.

While still very uncommon, there's a slight uptick in people buying property under the name of a corporation, trust, etc. Challenge there is keeping the officers / owners secret. Some states make it easy while others, likely including PA, don't. Regardless, it's a barrier.

Also, the government sells data too, such as the DMV (PennDOT). Doubt the spam calls are due to that. However, ads for insurance, etc could be. It's very difficult to hide one's personal information when so many are seeking to enrich themselves with it. Credit bureaus are another. It's endless.

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