A good, well seasoned title company should still catch it. No two closings are ever the same, but there is a fairly decent feel, rhythm, cadence, etc. to how each transaction typically goes and the moment something starts to feel off, the escrow officer should do a little extra digging. Some of these title shops are just churn and burn, though, and aren’t really paying attention to the transaction. Escrow assistants help order the survey, HOA docs, get the paperwork in line, escrow officer makes sure the CD and docs are in good shape, and away they go. But you see the same docs thousands and thousands of times over and the little discrepancies start to stand out. Handwriting of the seller and the notary almost perfectly match, a supposedly 95 year old seller with a perfect signature, things like that.
But in my own personal experience, sometimes you start saying “well, that’s weird…” one too many times, do a little digging, and find the body they were trying to hide. For my couple of examples, it wasn’t anything overtly criminal, but more along the lines of family members of elderly sellers trying to take a shortcut instead of going through the courts to allow the sale of an owner who is disabled or a husband and wife who are not on good terms and one spouse is trying to sell a property without the other.