Hawaiian officials are warning residents that unscrupulous investors are trying to take advantage of the fire disaster on Maui to take over properties.

Gov. Josh Green reported that residents are being approached about selling fire-damaged home or land sites by people posing as real estate agents.

He said those people may have “ill intent” and issued a warning to scammers.

“You would be pretty poorly informed if you try to steal land from our people and then build here,” Green said in a press release Monday.

The Hawaiian governor Josh Green revealed plans for the state to potentially purchase properties in the seaside town of Lahaina, which was devastated by the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history.“I’m already thinking of ways for the state to acquire that land so that we can put it into workforce housing, to put it back into families, or make it open spaces in perpetuity as a memorial to the people who were lost,” Green commented amid the ruins.

Maui Police Chief John Pelletier is no stranger to responding to mass tragedy. Nearly six years before disaster struck in the form of wildfires that ripped through parts of the island and killed at least 99 people, he was on the ground in the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Pelletier was named chief of the the Maui Police Department in 2021 after more than two decades working in Las Vegas. On Oct. 1, 2017, Pelletier was the incident commander covering the Strip when a gunman unleashed a hail of bullets on a country music festival, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more.