Abstract

Property Conveyance Fraud Tracking and Mapping
Track: Business GIS
Author(s): Joan Decker, Megan Heckert

It happens all too often. Financially strapped homeowners get an offer to help them out of their bind, prevent foreclosure, and save their home. Thinking they have found the solution to their problems, they sign up, only to find, months later, that the offer was a fraud, and they have lost their homes. Philadelphia's Property Conveyance Fraud Task Force is setting out to end this and other fraudulent practices, and have set up a web-mapping site to help them do it. The report tracking and mapping application leverages ArcIMS to facilitate incident reporting and communications between the various government and non-profit organizations in the Task Force. It enables rapid visualization of the distribution of fraud across the city, and alerting of new incident reports meeting specified criteria. A second phase will employ spatial statistics to determine local hot-spots of fraudulent activity to target interventions.

Joan Decker
Philadelphia Department of Records
City Hall, Rm. 156
Philadelphia , Pennsylvania 19107
United States
Phone: 215-686-2261
E-mail: joan.decker@phila.gov

Megan Heckert
Avencia Incorporated
340 N. 12th St.
Suite 402
Philadelphia , Pennsylvania 19107
United States
Phone: 215-701-7712
E-mail: mheckert@avencia.com