The Ben Shapiro Show - July 17, 2026


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


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

175.68

Word count

3,332

Sentence count

216

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A new rental ripoff report just dropped in New York City is 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.

Transcript

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Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Property confiscation, higher taxes, new homeless encampments.
00:00:03.000 All of these are the hallmarks of good socialist government.
00:00:06.000 And that's what New Yorkers are getting.
00:00:08.000 Good and hard lately under the Zoran Momdani administration.
00:00:10.000 A new rental ripoff report just dropped in New York.
00:00:13.000 It's putting together all of the elements for a total housing disaster zone.
00:00:16.000 We'll dive into the craziest parts and we'll explain why these policies are doomed to fail.
00:00:21.000 Zoran Momdani continues his communistic takeover of New York City.
00:00:26.000 According to the New York Post, he has now laid out a 68 page report.
00:00:31.000 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 HEAP 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.
00:00:51.000 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.
00:01:07.000 He says, well, you know, it's an insurmountable barrier for rent burdened tenants to actually pay for those reports.
00:01:15.000 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. 0.80
00:01:26.000 And if you ban them from increasing the rent, then they're just going to stop building new units and they're going to get out of the business. 0.98
00:01:31.000 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.
00:01:39.000 Every single thing that Momdani is doing right now is designed to actually drive up the price of rent.
00:01:44.000 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.
00:01:58.000 Man, 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 is a Scrooge McDuck.
00:02:09.000 Bank in the back of their house, and they just go swimming around in the gold every night. 1.00
00:02:12.000 It's incredibly stupid. 1.00
00:02:14.000 Incredibly stupid stuff. 1.00
00:02:15.000 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? 0.99
00:02:25.000 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.
00:02:33.000 You have something to seize. 0.77
00:02:35.000 But of course, this sort of stuff, I guess, is popular in newfound communist centers like New York. 0.67
00:02:43.000 Tony Marrero of the Hope Tenants Union is touting an end to the quote unquote violence of evictions. 0.94
00:02:49.000 And these are crazy people. 0.99
00:02:50.000 I'm sorry, these people are crazy. 0.93
00:02:52.000 This person is wearing a full face covering in the year 2026, flanked by the smart master himself, Zorhan Mamdani, who has that grin plastered on his face like he's something out of the horror movie smile. 0.70
00:03:07.000 And here you have this crazy lady wearing an N95 in 2026, along with her fishing hat with buttons on it. 0.71
00:03:13.000 These are the people making policy. 0.51
00:03:17.000 Our city is turning the corner on tenant power.
00:03:22.000 When we organize, we win results.
00:03:26.000 The Momdani administration is emboldening us so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions as a matter of business as usual.
00:03:38.000 She says she was wearing that because of all the smog from the Canadian wildfires.
00:03:41.000 Weird, no one else in the room is wearing one.
00:03:43.000 But in any case, the New York City dramatic dysfunction is a result of.
00:03:48.000 Communistic governance, of course, of course.
00:03:51.000 Apparently, NYCHA plumber supervisor Jacob Markowski earned $465,000 from July 2024 through June 2025.
00:04:01.000 That is more than the mayor and the city council speaker make combined.
00:04:05.000 The NYCHA is the New York City Housing Authority, and the plumbers and everybody else there, they're just making bank, absolute bank.
00:04:13.000 70 of the employees of the New York City Housing Administration have been charged with bribery and extortion in 2024.
00:04:23.000 They're collecting less rent.
00:04:25.000 Many of the families are unemployed.
00:04:30.000 Essentially, you just keep driving up the prices.
00:04:32.000 That is what is happening here.
00:04:35.000 But the real goal here in the end is a socialistic government takeover of the means of production.
00:04:40.000 It's been made very clear.
00:04:42.000 You may recall the New York City housing director, Sia Weaver, talking about property as a collective good.
00:04:50.000 I think the reality is that for centuries, we've really treated.
00:04:56.000 Property as an individualized good and not a collective good.
00:05:00.000 And we are going to transition to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently. 0.81
00:05:11.000 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. 0.95
00:05:26.000 This is what they want a different relationship to property. 1.00
00:05:28.000 The government's going to tell you what you can own and how you can own all of it.
00:05:31.000 Now, here's the thing.
00:05:32.000 Americans generally do not like this stuff.
00:05:34.000 They don't.
00:05:36.000 68% of Democrats, according to the latest Harvard Harris poll, prefer free enterprise to socialism.
00:05:43.000 Overall, 78% of Americans believe that we are better off with free enterprise than we are with socialism.
00:05:51.000 And when it comes to the meritocracy, it turns out that overall, 88% of Americans believe in a system rooted in merit and work, as opposed to 12% believing that everybody should get the same regardless of the work they do.
00:06:04.000 Even 86% of Democrats believe in a system that allows you to earn whatever you can based on your merit and your work.
00:06:11.000 So, what exactly do the propagandists have to do?
00:06:12.000 They have to tell you that neither of those things is possible.
00:06:15.000 There can't be a merit and work based system, and that free enterprise systems are actually bad.
00:06:19.000 And also, they have to tell you one other thing socialism isn't actually what you see in, say, China or Cuba or Venezuela or the Soviet Union.
00:06:26.000 Socialism is the extremely capitalistic system of Denmark because Denmark has universal health care.
00:06:33.000 That is not correct.
00:06:34.000 Denmark is a capitalist system.
00:06:35.000 With a bunch of significant social welfare programs.
00:06:38.000 It's what we used to call a mixed economy, obviously.
00:06:40.000 But this is why, if you just deliberately confuse people, if you say socialism means universal health care plus capitalism, people are like, oh, it doesn't sound so bad.
00:06:51.000 If you never define the term, you can make it sound better than it is.
00:06:53.000 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.
00:07:05.000 Same thing, by the way.
00:07:08.000 Six in ten Americans believe that you can own your own business under socialism.
00:07:15.000 Okay, well, what you're talking about now is not socialism.
00:07:17.000 What you're talking about now is essentially state capitalism, or mercantilism, or economic fascism.
00:07:24.000 It's a different thing.
00:07:27.000 So the left always has to lie about what it is they are attempting to do.
00:07:32.000 Now, this comes along with a broader worldview for the left, in which, I mean, again, the hard left worldview is.
00:07:40.000 That yes, you should get the same result no matter what you do. 1.00
00:07:42.000 Meritocracy work, these are irrelevant and they're stupid. 1.00
00:07:44.000 The Neville Roy Singham idea. 1.00
00:07:47.000 And that manifests, by the way, in being extraordinarily soft on crime.
00:07:52.000 Bunch of stories now coming out that are pretty horrifying on Democrats being incredibly soft on crime.
00:07:59.000 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.
00:08:11.000 That person's name was Tu Lu Vang, an illegal alien from Laos who had been convicted in 2006 of first degree criminal sexual conduct after repeatedly assaulting a girl.
00:08:20.000 Between 2002 and 2004, when she was 10.
00:08:25.000 Well, Walls then offered that guy a pardon.
00:08:28.000 And he said, We can't be judged by our worst day.
00:08:30.000 This is where Democrats are.
00:08:31.000 I mean, this is just, I'm sorry, this is now just pure bane in Dark Knight Rises stuff here.
00:08:39.000 Did that make us any safer?
00:08:42.000 Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable?
00:08:45.000 Did it improve the idea that we can't all be judged by our worst day?
00:08:52.000 And I want to be very clear these are horrific crimes.
00:08:55.000 They often are.
00:08:58.000 They're horrific crimes, but we can't be judged by our worst day.
00:09:01.000 No, I think that's actually the purpose of criminal law to judge you by your worst day, or at least to prevent you from having another worst day.
00:09:07.000 Zar Mamdani is so crazy about this stuff.
00:09:09.000 He actually went to Rikers to watch the World Cup.
00:09:12.000 This is where we are now.
00:09:16.000 The Senate, the United States.
00:09:27.000 We literally just went to Rikers to watch the World Cup with a bunch of inmates. 0.99
00:09:32.000 With the Smarmy Green. 0.93
00:09:34.000 People who are incarcerated here on Rikers, they too are a part of New York City.
00:09:38.000 The World Cup has been a magical moment for the entire city.
00:09:41.000 These are New Yorkers, and they will be New Yorkers when they get out of Rikers.
00:09:44.000 They're New Yorkers today, and I wanted to make sure that we can celebrate this moment together.
00:09:51.000 Celebrate the moment with the rapists and the predators in Rikers. 0.91
00:09:54.000 This is insane. 1.00
00:09:56.000 This is insane.
00:09:57.000 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.
00:10:05.000 And again, it's percolating and growing in part thanks to domestic concerns, but not insignificantly thanks to the help of our foreign enemies.
00:10:13.000 Now, speaking of crime and getting away with it, we had the opportunity yesterday to sit down with a man who got away with crime for like solidly a decade.
00:10:21.000 Joining me online is Matthew Cox.
00:10:23.000 Matthew is a former fraudster turned writer, podcaster, and consumer protection advocate who's actually once on the U.S. Secret Service's most wanted list for title theft and mortgage fraud.
00:10:32.000 And then he did 12 years in prison before rebuilding his life.
00:10:35.000 And today he uses that experience to educate people like us on the realities of these crimes and how to protect ourselves.
00:10:41.000 Matthew, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:10:42.000 Really appreciate it.
00:10:44.000 Yep.
00:10:44.000 Thank you for having me.
00:10:46.000 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?
00:10:54.000 How easy was it to get away with them?
00:10:57.000 So, home title theft is basically transferring the title to someone's house.
00:11:04.000 Or maybe assuming someone's name and then borrowing money against the house.
00:11:11.000 A lot of people think it's not possible, but it happens all the time and it's happening more and more as time goes on.
00:11:19.000 It's happening a lot more now than when I was doing it.
00:11:22.000 It's a very easy crime, it's becoming easier all the time simply because everything is done online at this point.
00:11:28.000 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.
00:11:35.000 I had to create the documents, go back to public records.
00:11:37.000 I had to go into the bank.
00:11:39.000 I had to go to the title company for the closings.
00:11:43.000 All of that can be done sitting in your local coffee shop on their Wi Fi using a cheap computer purchased over the internet.
00:11:55.000 So it's very easy now to commit this crime.
00:12:00.000 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.
00:12:10.000 Is there any authenticating these records when they're filed?
00:12:13.000 Is there anybody checking to make sure this doesn't happen?
00:12:16.000 No, no.
00:12:17.000 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?
00:12:24.000 Like nobody is looking, nobody's calling to verify.
00:12:27.000 Anything filed in public records, as long as you check all the boxes, it has to be filed.
00:12:33.000 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.
00:12:41.000 They're not allowed to call the bank and say, Is this satisfaction of mortgage correct?
00:12:46.000 Did you guys send this to us?
00:12:49.000 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?
00:12:55.000 They're not really legally allowed to do that.
00:13:00.000 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.
00:13:10.000 The idea that somebody can just go falsify the record, nobody checks it, and then all the money just gets taken out.
00:13:14.000 I mean, that's the question.
00:13:15.000 Once the property title was put in your name, because you did this, What would you typically do with it?
00:13:22.000 So, this is the thing.
00:13:23.000 It depends on the house, right?
00:13:24.000 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 give you one example.
00:13:37.000 I drove by the house, got the guy's name.
00:13:39.000 I created a fake appraisal saying, of course, he owned the house and the house was worth several hundred thousand dollars.
00:13:47.000 I then went to several banks.
00:13:48.000 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.
00:14:02.000 I actually satisfied the lien on the property because it was paid for free and clear.
00:14:06.000 The bank was willing to lend me money, even though the credit had no credit.
00:14:12.000 Even though the owner had no credit because I was using a stolen social security number.
00:14:17.000 And I got several banks to lend me money on that home at the same time.
00:14:22.000 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.
00:14:33.000 He was involved in the crime.
00:14:35.000 That's just one example.
00:14:36.000 I've also rented houses from people and, in their name, borrowed money against the home.
00:14:43.000 I have also, you know, I've rented houses.
00:14:49.000 I've also convinced homeowners to owner finance their homes or just outright bought the house and then borrowed money against it.
00:14:57.000 I mean, it's a crime that has, you're just not really safe.
00:15:01.000 That's what I'm trying to get at is you're just not, people think, oh, I'm safe.
00:15:05.000 A lot of people will think, That they have a mortgage on their house.
00:15:10.000 Let's say your house is worth half a million dollars and you have a mortgage for, I don't know, $490,000.
00:15:15.000 And you think, oh, I'm safe.
00:15:16.000 I really don't have any equity for anybody to steal.
00:15:18.000 That's irrelevant.
00:15:19.000 I can simply create a satisfaction of mortgage from your title or from your mortgage company, file it downtown, and your mortgage disappears.
00:15:27.000 And I can now borrow against that false equity in your house.
00:15:32.000 So if you're the homeowner and this happens to you, when do you first find out that this has actually happened to you?
00:15:37.000 Because again, Most of the time, when somebody commits a crime against you, a physical crime, you're on the scene.
00:15:41.000 It happens to you, you know about it, you report it, and the reaction is fast.
00:15:45.000 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?
00:15:52.000 It could be months, months.
00:15:54.000 And I'm long gone, by the way.
00:15:57.000 I've borrowed half a million, a million.
00:16:00.000 At one point, I borrowed 1.3 million against a piece of property.
00:16:05.000 And then by the time the homeowner is notified, I've already pulled the money out of the bank and I'm gone.
00:16:13.000 It could be months.
00:16:13.000 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.
00:16:22.000 So it's a long time.
00:16:25.000 It's unfortunately a very safe crime for the perspective of the thief.
00:16:32.000 So, how long were you able to get away with this before you were finally caught and how were you caught?
00:16:38.000 I want to say the US attorney said I did it for a decade.
00:16:41.000 I think that's a little bit longer than I actually did.
00:16:44.000 Probably, let's say, seven or eight years.
00:16:47.000 I was also on the run for once they found me or caught up with me.
00:16:50.000 I went on the run for three years and borrowed another three and a half million while on the run.
00:16:59.000 Listen, I know it's horrible.
00:16:59.000 I know it.
00:17:01.000 I know.
00:17:02.000 I understand.
00:17:04.000 It's funny because for me, it was so long ago.
00:17:07.000 And now I was actually in prison and I used to watch the infomercial for Home Title Lock.
00:17:15.000 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.
00:17:25.000 And I thought, you know, the reason this exists is because people don't believe it's possible.
00:17:33.000 And that's a problem.
00:17:34.000 They're not looking out for themselves, they're not monitoring their title.
00:17:38.000 And that is the main issue.
00:17:39.000 They're not monitoring their title.
00:17:41.000 And then even if they're notified by the police, what do you do then?
00:17:45.000 I mean, you're not a lawyer.
00:17:47.000 The average person is not a real estate attorney.
00:17:50.000 They don't have $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to hire a real estate attorney.
00:17:55.000 And if you have a company like Home Title Lock, then they'll monitor the title.
00:18:02.000 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.
00:18:10.000 And so that's really kind of why I'm doing this.
00:18:16.000 Well, it's an amazing story and a horrifying story for a lot of people who have never suspected this could happen to them.
00:18:21.000 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.
00:18:29.000 Head on over to HometitleLock.com.
00:18:31.000 Use promo code BEN to get a free title history report from Hometitle Lock.
00:18:34.000 They're also going to give you a free trial of their million dollar triple lock protection to give you that peace of mind.
00:18:38.000 That's HometitleLock.com, promo code BEN for free peace of mind.
00:18:42.000 Matthew Cox, thanks so much for taking the time and for giving us that information.
00:18:45.000 Really important stuff.
00:18:47.000 Thank you.
00:18:48.000 Thanks for having me.
00:18:49.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:18:51.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:18:52.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.