Have you ever been the one who noticed a deed was fake?

Once on a survey long ago we discovered two small adjacent parcels that had suspicious descrptions. Both described the same monuments as their corners. One description was written in a clockwise directiion, while the other was written in a counter-clockwise direction. A clever way to double your money.

The survey we were performing was on an adjacent parcel so these two were abutters. We only found one parcel matching the two descriptions, and consulted our attorney about the scandalous deeds. The parcel (or both parcels) were vacant.

Close, but no cigar.  A fellow called from what was basically a ghost town.  I had never had a job in that town so I asked him all sorts of quesions that might help me find places to search for monuments.  He had lived there his entire life and didn't know of anyone ever having a survey done.  Then he told me about and old boy that lived there who had once been a real estate salesman.  He had sold all sorts of vacant lots around the town to suckers.  His wife was a notary so she would notarize his signature as being the seller.  Eventually, the suckers would discover he was not the owner of the land he sold them.  Trying to get blood from a turnip was just one more way to spend money, so, somehow, the guy kept getting away with it.

I decided the job was going to cost my caller far too much money and he agreed with me.

Yes, I've found a few. 

Not exactly fraud, more like a colossal mistake made by a surveyor in the early 1960's who subdivided a Gov. lake front lot. All of the original lots were protracted by BLM within the section, 330' wide and abutting the lake. The surveyor created two lots out of this Gov. Lot, 200' wide with a 130' wide remainder. The remainder should have been platted as being on the east side of the 200', but instead was placed on the west side, where it overlapped the adjacent Gov. Lot. He monumented it as well. What made it even more remarkable is the 130' remainder overlapping the adjacent Gov. Lot, was sold by local government by way of a Clerk's Deed when the taxes on it weren't kept current and the purchasers used it as collateral on a 100k mortgage.  Subsequently every other deed along the lake was based on this plat and all of them were off from where their descriptions had them by 130'. I just filed a ROS outlining how everything fell out and recorded it and quietly walked away. I was surveying a telephone cable in the lake for an easement from the State and had to tie it to the uplands. Probably a good thing nobody actually looks at those things. 

A bit like Williwaw's case.  The doofus surveyor had the tract in the wrong range.  I merely stumbled onto the recorded survey while looking for something else.  I knew the land where the survey was supposed to be.  I also knew the owners of land precisely six miles further east and that was the client's name.  I let the Register of Deeds make the call to inform Mr. Doofus that his survey had a major error.  The fortunate thing was that no transfer of ownership had occurred as of that date.

I got a call to settle a friendly dispute between two cousins and the county tax assessor as to which side of a property line a building was supposed to be on. Turns out  an employee at the courthouse created a fake deed with only a tax parcel number as its description, recorded the deed, waited a couple of years, and sold it to cousin A. The land in question belonged to cousin B. In the end, I helped them with a boundary line agreement to establish a definite boundary and neither wanted to prosecute the courthouse lady.