TAMPA, Fla. — Tampa Realtor Jason Papi knows a good house where he sees it. He’s a real estate investor. He showed us around one of the houses he renovated.
“The growth of this area is what amped us up about getting property here,” Jason Papi said. He’s getting a name for knowing the real estate market.
“We like finding out what properties will be available for us to come in and kind of put our spin on it,” Papi said.
But recently, he says he’s been getting a bad name.
“We actually started getting calls from pretty upset contractors, investors, homeowners, because I'm in that line of work myself,” Papi said.
All because he says somebody has been using his name to fill out code enforcement complaints at least 87 times.
“I called the city and brought it to their attention,” Papi said. “I spoke with a representative from intake on these complaints, and she informed me that she had seen them coming in, in my name, at a rate of six to eight per week now for a few months.
"So, I pleaded with her to, you know, get her to stop them from coming in."
They never stopped. And the phone calls from angry homeowners thinking he was complaining about their property didn’t either. People saying sales of homes didn’t go through because of a code violation they thought he submitted.
“Day to day, you know, I go outside to walk my dog. And I'm almost paranoid. Now, looking over my shoulder, maybe someone's upset with me, maybe someone lost a lot of money,” Papi said.
Here's the thing, 10 Investigates has found he’s potentially not the only one this is happening to. In the more than 7,400 complaints that came into the city of Tampa’s code enforcement, we found repeated names and email addresses between January 2022 and September 2023, including the names Issac Booth and Louis Fernandez. More than 350 complaints were made via email and more than 1,200 were reported online.
The rest came through message boards, phone calls or other means.
“I found more and more information, more and more information. And it's just skyrocketing into a whole pretty much fraudulent operation they're doing with using people's names,” said Julie Magill, a contractor and realtor in Tampa.
Magill said she has been paying attention to this mess after she contacted Papi for a friend, who had said he filed a code complaint on his property.
“I think there should be a third-party authorization. I mean, you know, when we go to log in through a credit card, we have to get a text on our phone, something like that. That would solve them using somebody else's name,” Magill said.
And after 10 Investigates brought this to her attention, State Rep. Dianne Hart, D-Tampa, says that’s something her office is now looking into.
“I think if they are going to do it, they have to have something to verify and have a mechanism in place,” Hart said.
Two years ago, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 60 which no longer allowed someone filing a code enforcement violation to do so anonymously. But as the system is set up now, anyone can type in any name, any email address and hit submit, there’s no verification system in place to confirm the identity.
“It’s something we should take a look at because it could be very dangerous,” Hart said.
As for Papi, he says the only way he will feel better is when the loophole that’s put him front and center is closed.
“I think that the system that they have in place now is flawed. I think that if something like this can happen to someone, it can happen again, right? And if it's not being taken seriously, that usually in my opinion, would yield some sort of change if the system is as flawed as it is, and it can cause harm or danger to a local family,” Papi said.
We reached out to the city of Tampa for comment about how they are handling code enforcement complaints. They declined to talk to us on camera. But they did tell us that if Papi was to file a complaint in the future, they would need to have it notarized to authenticate his identity.
Tampa City Council heard from about a half dozen people at a November meeting regarding code enforcement issues. After listening to the complaints, the council decided to look at the issue at a workshop in February.
The platforms used to report potential violations vary by city and county across the Bay Area. You can report an issue in Tampa through Tampa Connect.
- In other parts of Hillsborough County, go here
- St. Petersburg uses See Click Fix
- In other areas of Pinellas County, you can report violations here
- In Manatee County, you can report violations here
- Here’s where to report in Pasco County
- Here’s where to report in Polk County
- The city of Sarasota uses Citizen Connect to take violation reports
- And here’s where to report in other areas of Sarasota County