MORTGAGE fraud continues to expand, in both the number of incidents and the methods that criminals use to strip equity from homeowners and lenders. Now a new online service offers free help to keep homeowners safe from an emerging form of fraud known as “house theft.”

Like other real estate Web sites, this new service, called ePropertyWatch.com, provides informal home appraisals and other information to help track neighborhood real estate activity. But unlike the others, it also monitors public documents associated with a home and promises to alert homeowners to possible criminal activity, like a forged deed that purports to transfer a home’s title in order to release an existing mortgage.

In this form of fraud, thieves take “ownership” of the home so they can “sell” it to nefarious associates who have taken out another loan on the property. The “seller” then splits the sale proceeds with the fraudulent buyer.

Industry analysts called ePropertyWatch’s service a useful tool for homeowners, though it is being offered only in major metropolitan areas right now.

EPropertyWatch is owned by First American CoreLogic, a company based in Santa Ana, Calif., which, among other things, collects real estate and mortgage data from municipalities and sells it to businesses.

Reported cases of mortgage fraud over all jumped 36 percent during the 2008 fiscal year, from the previous 12 months, to nearly 64,000 incidents, according to an annual report released in July by the F.B.I.

Although house theft, or “title theft,” is less common than other forms of mortgage fraud, Ann Fulmer, the vice president for business relations at Interthinx, a fraud-prevention company that contributed data to the F.B.I. report, said it was “incredibly easy to do.” This type of fraud is most prevalent in cities with many vacant properties, like Detroit and Miami, she said.

Users register for the ePropertyWatch service by identifying their home’s address and then choosing their name from a list of randomly generated made-up names, to help ensure that only the true property owner registers on the site.

Brad Strothkamp, an analyst with Forrester Research, a research and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., said the fraud detection service was particularly helpful.

“It’s so difficult to get this type of information from such a reputable source,” he said, referring to both the fraud detection and the automated appraisal information.

To estimate a home’s value, ePropertyWatch uses information like nearby home sales and recent property appraisals, among other data. That informal appraisal, said Michael Maron, a senior vice president with First American, will typically be within 10 percent of the home’s actual market value.

The Web site also shows recent sales and foreclosures in the user’s neighborhood, as well as long-term changes in the median sales price of the ZIP code. Users can sign up to receive an e-mail message whenever a new lien is placed on the home, for instance, or when their assessed value changes by any amount the homeowners deem significant.

Mr. Strothkamp said consumers might use the site’s automated appraisals to help them cut their property taxes. Mr. Strothkamp, who lives in Northern California, said homeowners in areas with declining property values could collect evidence and present it to their local tax assessor as part of the formal challenge process.

There is one weakness in the service that will affect a significant number of homeowners. Namely, it covers only major metropolitan areas, so residents in outlying areas cannot yet register for the service because First American does not have enough reliable data on such areas.

Some suburbs like Westchester County, for instance, are not yet covered, while others, like New Haven County in Connecticut, are only partly covered.

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