I have had people show up at my house to ask if it was for rent, based on a fake post on Facebook using photos from Zillow from before my home was sold.
My realtor helped me get the photos taken down, but the Facebook ads for it are up to this day. Facebook completely ignores any and all attempts by me to report this malfeasance -- even though these ads literally have my personal home address on them!
It's a huge safety risk to me and not due to anything I did whatsoever; all I did was buy a house that was on the market and then move into it. It's a nightmare.
I would contact Facebook legal directly with documents showing the problem. Legal’s job is always to minimize liability for the company, and they have levers they can pull in any organization, no matter how “hyper scale” they claim to be.
Bonus points for figuring out the correct language to use to imply repercussions for failure to act without any actual threats. Patio11 has written about similarly worded letters with regards to debt collections and banking, and I know that there are all kinds of magic incantations in law for all kinds of transgretions.
"Patio11" itself is a magic incantion for your friendly neighborhood LLM, along with "dangerous professional". You can use these to prompt for suitable language in the email, as well as other courses of action.
Facebook admits around 10% of their ads are fraudulent. I think it's much higher.
The scam is even larger than you see and exploits missing children reports. There are huge automated scam networks that post missing children reports then get people to share them. Then once the post/ad gets traction they change it to a listing of a house that is auto pulled from public information. They then use that to scam people.
A leaked Facebook document showed they know which ads are fraudulent because the ad system is programmed to never show those ads to the ad regulators, and it's most of the ads.
To scam people out of some made up fee. Application fee, filing fee, holding fee, reservation fee., whatever BS they can get someone to send them a few bucks for since it's all free money to them.
I'm not sure I get the huge safety risk. You buy a property and you're in a public registry. There's no anonymity at that point in the US other than setting up trusts or other ownership screens.
First of all, like you say, those registries can have an LLC's name or the name of a trust, etc. It may not be my name. But some rando showing up doesn't know me, they want to occupy my house.
Second, those registries are much harder to find me in than a random Facebook Marketplace ad.
Third, those registries do not advertise that I am trying to sell my property or rent it out; there is no invitation to come to my home and approach me. I have literally had people show up at my door asking why I'm there if my house is for rent. Imagine if one of those people - as is common on Facebook Marketplace - was unhinged or dangerous, or got mad when I told them the truth.
It is a direct threat to my safety in a way that the mere record of my ownership of the property wouldn't be (if it had my name on it).
how much of your time do these visits take up, can you document it and then sue Facebook in small claims court for your time and effort? This seems a stretch but maybe it could be made to work, it could be amusing if so.
1. Author lost me at his first sentence: "Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life." I am careful and aware of this possibility, but AFAIK I have not experienced this, nor have "most people" I know. o_O Crazy times.
2. I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere? i.e. Torrens-style
I'm equally careful and aware. Years ago, now, I discovered that someone in New Mexico (if I recall correctly) was working under my Social Security number. That was likely someone not authorized to work in the US writing random digits on an I9 form. No amount of care will protect against that.
It wasn't easy to clear up, either. I'm fortunate that a close friend worked (at the time) for the SS administration, and was able to do basically all of the leg-work for me: I just had to sign a few forms he sent me. Someone not equally connected would have had a much harder time.
I'm also painfully aware that effectively every scrap of everyone's personal data has been repeatedly leaked online. I doubt that any amount of care has much to do with whether or not I'll be targeted at some point in the future.
>That was likely someone not authorized to work in the US writing random digits on an I9 form.
I used to work a job years ago with lots of people who snuck in here. In order to get the job they needed to provide a social. Not having any idea wtf a social security number was, just that they needed one, it was a relief when someone they lived with or met on the street informed them that xyz at location abc will sell you one for $100.
That's one spot where the identity theft rubber meets the road. And practically everyone's social has been leaked by now.
> nearly all Americans now treat this as a Very Secret Number
I don't think that they actually do in practice. Last time I opened an account with Comcast they required your social security number. Same with an AT&T cell plan.
I'm not sure people treat this as a Very Secret Number. Certainly using SSNs publically has gone away, but people are willing to provide their SSNs to basically anyone that asks for it. Heck, some job applications ask for your SSN.
I'm surprised I haven't had more problems with identity theft. Equifax handed all our financial information to criminals a decade ago. Then last year the US government handed all our financial information to a con man.
If you don't dispute it, yes. However, if you don't dispute it, IRS knows about it as well and will be asking for their cut. Generally, the benefit increase is not worth higher taxes.
That's a fair point, but in the interests of a concise story I left out a couple of details: there were three different names associated with my SSN; all of the jobs were agricultural; there weren't any bank account, housing, or other identity-markers associated with my number. (I don't know how much of that I would have been able to figure out on my own, or even if my buddy should have told me that much, but it's nice to have friends in useful places.) I'm pretty sure about what happened.
Sidenote: I don't bear any ill will towards whoever used my SSN. It's not like I was targeted, or even that any harm to me was intended. This was a "hack" of a dysfunctional immigration and employment system, in a way that's totally obvious and easy to anticipate. My ire is reserved for those in positions of responsibility who maintain a regime that is manifestly not fit for purpose.
In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant and have them disappear with it for a few minutes, about once a year my bank would call me to ask if I'd been using my card in some far-off locale:
"Hi! Are you in Tijuana?"
"Not since 1993. Why? What's up?"
"So you didn't just try to buy gasoline at a PEMEX there?"
"Nope, I'm in San Francisco as speak."
"OK, thanks! We'll get a new card out in the mail to you."
That's a pretty low bar for identity theft, but I think it's defensible.
I’ve been using debit and credit cards since long before the ‘dark old days’ ended (1992? 1993? Long before debit cards were a common thing), and I still hand my card to anyone who needs it to do their job. I’ve had identity theft happen a grand total of never.
Credit cards never generally required identity verification (especially not for the cost of a restaurant dinner; anti-fraud measures might kick in for larger purchases, though), that was always a "feature". (Credit card companies want people to spend money and have always prioritized that over fraud detection.) Even the whole "I'm going to write Check ID on the card signature line" thing was never officially recognized by credit card providers, and explicitly was against the Terms of Service of most of them. The signature line was never meant to be an anti-fraud tool, it was your acknowledgement that you had read your Card's Terms of Service and accepted that contract, a holdover from the days before software invented shrinkwrapped/clickwrapped/SaaS contract acceptance and contracts still generally needed an explicit signature of acceptance. (That's the reason signature lines are just now disappearing, the Credit Card industry is finally following the software industry on "any and all possible uses of our services is acceptance of all of our contracts"; nothing to do with how much more NFC and EMV chips are secure against fraud.)
You must have been going to some very shady restaurants. I still hand off my credit card to a rando. I did it today. I did it last weekend. I've never had this problem.
Yeah I agree. Not only do I hand off my card, literally everyone I know does so. None have ever had problems. I'm not saying that such fraud never happens, because it obviously does happen. But I don't think it's so overwhelmingly common as is being claimed here.
In my lifetime, I had my card details stolen once (in Washington DC). It was an American Express. They caught it immediately and shipped me a new card before I even noticed.
It was basically “we caught some shady shit, here is your new card number, which will be delivered today”. It is one of the reasons I like Amex. They are johnny-on-the-spot when they get a sniff of fraud.
This source[0] is hardly unbiased, so take this with a heavy dose of "citation needed", but it claims:
> 62 million Americans had fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards last year alone, with unauthorized purchases exceeding $6.2 billion annually.
That jives with the number of unauthorized transactions I've had on my cards. 62/260 million adults = about a quarter of adults each year. On average I probably average a fraudulent transaction in a quarter of the years.
I had my corporate card get cloned by the Wendys at Seatac airport, about 10 years ago. Do you consider that to be a sketchy restaurant? Why are you victim blaming?
I had not used the card in several weeks. Coffee and a breakfast sandwich at Wendys was the only purchase I made that day. ~4 hours later my card was declined when checking in to my hotel in LA. Called their security department, they wanted to know whether I had authorized a $4000 purchase at a Best Buy in Dallas.
I don't know how to define sketchy. I believe you. I just don't know how to account for the difference in experience.
> In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant
I don't think I've ever seen anyone use a phone to pay at a restaurant. I think I generally see 95%+ pay with cards, the same way that "was" common. The rest is cash. Maybe I'm just not paying attention? I don't know.
"everything I see online" is probably disproportionately outliers. I use a credit card hundreds of times a year in many places around the world and at least cursorily keep my eye on charges in my statements and fraudulent charges are rare--like maybe every few years at most.
I've been using my credit card at restaurants for 30 years. I've used it probably 5000 times, and I've only had the number stolen once (from a grocery store).
Where are these low-trust areas of the US? I want to visit and check it out.
Back when computers were actually expensive and wireless networking technology wasn’t as good/common, they would take your card to the back office and run it on the single, hardwired card terminal.
Nowadays it’s less of an issue as those terminals cost peanuts and WiFi is ubiquitous so they have many of them and can just bring one to your table.
When there was only a single terminal it was common in Europe to just... walk to the counter and pay for the meal card in hand. No other way to type in your PIN
Not universally true. I had a couple of cards without a chip because, reasons. I still was walking to the counter myself, because giving somebody my card feels weird.
I was having lunch at a hotel bar in Vegas a number of years back. A Brit, I think, was paying for his meal and he was like "why are they taking my card???" So I explained. In my experience in the UK, they don't want to even touch your card.
I've been using a debit card since the Dubya administration and I have never had someone use my card after I ate at a restaurant. I assume you live in a big metro area?
In Texas about a decade ago there was a criminal enterprise out of Houston that was putting swimmers on gas station pumps all over the state. Little towns, big towns, country gas stations. My now wife got hit that way.
Reminds me of the carbon copies (actual carbon copies) some local car renter made. They wrote your risk on the carbon copy as a "reservation", carbon copied your CC onto it and stored it in a safe. Pretty much a list of ready-to-use cards if you got hold of them.
My mom used to tell me to write CHECK ID in the signature block. Someone only ever asked me once. It's probably been like 10 years since I've signed the back of a new card. An older woman at an antique shop actually checked for a signature and made me sign it in front of her.
If you look at the credit card agreement, a card isn’t (or at least wasn’t) authorized for use unless it had an actual signature. “Check ID” and such are cute, but really only mean that the card is unsigned and thus invalid.
The fact that a signature is, to date, a legally binding form of identification is baffling to me to be honest. More and more is digital these days, but still.
(my "signature" is just a squiggle based on my initials and I can't reproduce it consistently)
I was telling my lawyer a couple of weeks ago that I wasn't even sure I could do it consistently any longer and actually practiced a bit before going to the office. She basically said "Do the best you can" :-)
No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry because that is not an enumerated power of the federal government. The individual states have sovereignty over their own land and each has its own system for land registration. The article you linked to even names several states that have a partial Torrens title system.
The claim that the title insurance industry is the reason for lack of adoption of Torrens title schemes is uncited, and immediately followed by descriptions of several cases where Torrens title was adopted (often poorly) and later abandoned.
> No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry because that is not an enumerated power of the federal government.
I think you misunderstood the post you were replying to. Torrens title was invented in Australia. Just like in the US, land titles are a state responsibility in Australia not a federal one. But each state has a central statewide land registry which is the authoritative source of truth for land ownership. By contrast, US states hold land title records in a decentralised way (at the local government level not the state level), and those records aren’t legally decisive.
Most common law jurisdictions have centralised land titles, but often centralised at one level below the national government.
In fact, in the US, I'm not sure it even happens systematically at the state level. In the state where I live (Massachusetts) even though counties are largely vestigial, that's where deeds and such are registered and filed as far as I know. (Just went through this for various reasons.)
> how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth?
Oh, boy, let me tell you it is very disconcerting to pay a title company to do a search of legal records on a property, and the only guarantee they offer in some states is that "we didn't find anything suspicious but there is no guarantee that someone from the past won't pop up with a better claim to ownership. You can't hold it against us if that happens." How is it that most people making the biggest purchase of their lives are going along with that? I'm definitely not okay with it, but sometimes you can't buy property without accepting it- no title company will offer a stronger guarantee.
For details, I'm talking about how in some states the Special Warranty Deed is the standard for real estate purchases: https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-is-a-special-warrant.... A title company will guarantee that the current seller hasn't entered any agreements that might legally obligate you (such as offering the property as collateral for an outstanding loan), but they are very clear that actions of previous owners are not included in this guarantee. So there is no single source of truth- we just hope that we're not part of the tiny percentage where the special deed is insufficient.
Edit: for context, there is a distinction between title insurance and the deed itself, but the title company is only offering insurance on the deed, so if the deed only covers the previous owner then the insurance only covers that too.
No, what you describe is the entire purpose of owners title insurance. The idea that it “only covers previous owner” is false, it covers a wide variety of title defects.
No, the county clerk records aren’t a “single source of truth”. In the US system, it is possible to convince a court the county records are wrong, and order them overridden-which makes them not the single source of truth.
By contrast, in the Torrens system, whatever the government records say are final. If you are the innocent victim of a mistake by the government (or a fraud against it), the government has to compensate you; but you don’t actually get the land back if it has since been sold to an innocent purchaser.
But at least in some places in the US that's actually just a log of some kinds of transactions (sales and mortgages): you don't have a normalized field in a database somewhere that spits out "this person owns this spot" instead you have to build up from each individual transaction- plus there are transactions that don't take place on the log, e.g. deaths and inheritance or marriage/divorce that could take place outside the purview of the county clerk.
e.g. a married couple buys a house, then one of them dies, and the will is recorded in a different state and leaves their property to their kids rather than the spouse, that sort of update would not be recorded in the county clerk's office in my state.
Mostly, each county has its own registry. (In some cases, there is a statewide registry.) This works, because each parcel of land is clearly in one particular county.
Database mistakes on entry happen in Torrens. Rarer, but not unheard of. Tasmanian "owned" and lived on block for decades, when sold found they'd owned the one next door. There's a critical role in acceptance where somebody as agent has to say yay or nay and a Queensland couple had the agent say the wrong outcome when the real owner didn't consent and it went to the high court if I recall.
Hence the statement "possession is 9/10ths of the law" - for the vast majority of property that people care about, you prove you're the owner by possessing it
Property tax is also the other 9/10ths - if someone is paying the property tax they're presumed to be the owner unless there's a court fight; and in fact, if you want, in many places in the USA you can get adverse possession by paying property tax on unknown or unwanted property - or buy them at auction by paying the back property tax.
The ones you can easily do this on are all various kinds and forms of worthless land, but hey, it's out there!
I don't see how that matters, the point is that we don't need the federal government's mandate in order to have a national clearinghouse of title data.
> Unlike most common law jurisdictions, the United States doesn't have a central land registry due to lobbying from the title insurance industry.
These scammers will either (a) start with a stolen identity and see what land that person owns and try to sell it, or (b) find an interesting piece of land and steal that person's identity and pretend to be them.
In either case a 'definitive' database (or lack thereof) is not the problem.
Ontario and BC (e.g.) in Canada have a land registry:
I wonder why a commercial entity that registers ownership / titles for free, and bills for checking, did not spring up. Clearly there is moneyed demand for certainty about title rights, and if you can provide certainty (because the last deal was registered with you), it may be a more desirable product than mere insurance.
It’s turtles all the way down, though — how do you know that last deal had clear title? At some point you’re going to want insurance anyway.
In any case, the US system is already that the government records ownership (not for free, but for a small recording fee) and the title company charges for checking, and for insurance in case they get it wrong.
As just one example
of how it can go wrong, here in Seattle it’s common to find out your lot is nine inches smaller than you thought because surveying technology is a lot better now than it was when your deed was written in 1908.
It's complicated. I live on a parcel of a very old property by US standards (early 1800s) that was subdivided shortly before I bought it. Without going into all the details, my neighbor who also lives on a parcel of the original land had a survey done and it turned out there were some significant incursions into other properties.
And we're not talking inches.
But, yeah, even inches (or any liens) can be an issue when it comes time to sell.
The trick with title theft is they target property not closely watched as the author noted, but also worth roughly the legal costs the rightful owner will incur undoing the fradulent transfer.
Prison is crime university and ID theft and related crimes are high yield low risk crimes.
The system doesn't care and such title thefts have been increasing for 15-20 years already
That depends on the state. I live in Iowa where the state records the transaction and verifies everyone's identity. Almost nobody has title insurance because there is nothing to insure. Every other state I've lived in though isn't as good about checking ID and you need title insurance (who is very good about checking id)
The system in Iowa, is instead of getting title insurance from a private insurer (as is standard in the US), you get it from a state government agency (Iowa Title Guaranty) which has a legal monopoly on all title insurance in the state. But people in Iowa say they don't have "title insurance", because the term is defined to mean private insurance, not the insurance issued by the state government. A condition of the state-issued title insurance is you need to provide an attorney's legal opinion that there are no issues with the title, and then the insurance covers the risk the attorney did a bad job, or failed to notice some obscure issue or hidden issue. But this is different from a true Torrens title system, in that title registration is not (near-)conclusive evidence of legal title, only de facto presumptive.
A number of US states historically had Torrens title, but most have repealed it, effectively converting Torrens titles to non-Torrens. Illinois had it – only in Cook County – until it was repealed in 1992. California abolished it in 1955. Virginia abolished it in 2019. Washington state abolished it in 2022-2023.
The big advantage of Torrens title is that it eliminates the need for title insurance, or at least makes it much cheaper. (You can still buy title insurance in Australia, but the Torrens title system significantly reduces the risk to the insurer, resulting in lower premiums–the risk it is covering is not that you don't have title to the property at all, rather risks such as the boundary fences being in the wrong places.) But in those US states which had it, title insurers wouldn't give you any discount for having it, and banks would still insist on title insurance to lend, nullifying the primary practical advantage of the Torrens system–the end result was your property was under a different title system which many didn't understand, which could make real estate transactions appear more complex, discourage buyers and lenders, etc. This resulted in political pressure from landowners on the system to be allowed to move off it, which is what resulted in it being repealed.
I think the US state in which Torrens would be most likely to be successful would be Iowa, since private title insurance is banned there. However, repeated attempts to introduce Torrens in Iowa failed, because the attorneys who investigate the validity of titles saw it as a threat to their livelihoods, and they successfully lobbied the state legislature against the idea.
That is more or less how title insurance started back in the day.
In 1800 land was sold in person only by people who knew each other, in front of other witnesses who knew everybody in town. It worked great, which is why some states (I assume like CT) never bothered with a registry. In the mid 1800s as land out west started opening up for settlement (skip the whole bad treatment of the natives) investors "out east" wanted to invest in land and ran into a problem: they didn't want to go out to the land, but they knew scams existed so they started hiring trusted people to travel instead and verify they property owner was really the person they were buying from. Some states have a registry and so you don't need that, the state tracks owners and verifies the people buying/selling really are who they say they are.
Yet another example where "we can't have nice things" because entrenched businesses profit from keeping things not-nice. Title Insurance shouldn't even be a thing. This should be solvable by a database.
For identity theft, I think at this point it depends on where you set the bar. I've never had someone clean out my checking account or anything truly large, but my wife and I have had fraudulent charges on our credit cards several times as they've been leaked out one way or another. I would not "identify" as a "identity theft victim" per se if you asked me out of the blue, because compared to some of what I've heard about, I've had nothing more than minor annoyances come out of this. But yeah, I'd guess that it's fair to say that at this point most people have had at least some sort of identity-related issue at some point.
> Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere?
As with most things both law-related and US-related, it depends. This type of scam would not work in the majority of states due to various laws, regulations, and bookkeeping (it would be nearly* impossible to sell land you don’t own in California for example).
There are other states (and countries - I’m looking at you Canada) where fraudulent documentation and virtually non-existent title checks allow this kind of fraud to persist.
[*] yes - virtually, not completely. It can happen, but the laws are set up such that the land owner will retain their land, the title fraud victim will be made whole financially by a title insurance company. What this means in practice is that title insurance companies make sure every transaction is legitimate and people don’t have to worry about it.
Though I think there's way less of this issue in Japan because there are a lot of gov't-involving procedures and record ownership in land ownership transfers making it quite hard to go all the way(and hey, even in the US you have title insurance), there was a bit of a wild case a couple years back where a fraudster sold a 5.5 billion yen piece of land to a major developer[0].
Fraud is always fun to look at because people are constantly looking for those little windows of trust that end up forming in these flows because otherwise everything would take months to execute upon.
So the scam here doesn't seem to be ACTUALLY selling the land--it's basically engaging a realtor long enough to get earnest money on the table, then to disappear. Although if they could go far enough to get an entire amount wired to them I'm sure they'd take it.
Since a lot of people are doing all cash (non-financed) deals lately, I could see how a scammer and a lax realtor could possibly scam an overzealous buyer out of the full amount.
That still wouldn’t work in most states. The earnest money and the final payment are handled by an escrow company who does all the title verification or works hand in hand with the company doing the title verification. Neither set of funds is ever just handed over.
Again - it varies state to state, as the constitution dictates.
They're not trying to transfer ownership. They're trying to scam people out of the earnest money before a title search (ie ownership verification) happens.
Titles are very decentralized; they are likely modestly-competently managed at the county level, of which there up to 254 per state (Texas).
And identity theft is also very easy in the US. It happened to an old in my family. The state dmv happily mailed a replacement license to a completely different state without so much as checking with the person whose license it is. Just for the asking. It's absurd.
Different people understand "theft of identity" in different ways. If someone is impersonating you on the internet, or steals your credit card info and makes purchases on your behalf, that probably qualifies.
As for the nature of the scam, there are different levels of this. Most likely, the mark is the buyer / the escrow agency.
I have had my identity stolen [at least] three times in the last 15 years:
* OPM Hack
* Target Hack
* Equifax Hack
I say "at least" because there have been more, but I just started ignoring them after a while. I also had it stolen back in the late 1990s; and, thinking back, that was crazy for that time period.
I once had a visit from cops about dodgy cheques I had been writing. Weirdly they were more ready to believe I hadn't written the cheques, than the were about me not leaving my chequebook at a brothel I hadn't visited.
The last time I wrote a cheque I had to cross out the 19 to write in the year. I think they only gave up on that line of questioning when I provided enough evidence to say that the bank had not given me any chequebooks to lose.
I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people. I'm guessing it counts as identity theft.
Identity theft is not helped by processes that demand certainty and expediency causing pressure on employees to provide both even when they are not available. In a similar credit card issue with my partner, after all of the mess of departments trying to make it other departments' problems, my partner received an email saying that; in accordance with the phone conversation, the issue had been resolved. Having had no such phone conversation this caused a bit of panic, but upon contacting the bank they said that they had tried calling but there was no answer, but they were not allowed to resolve the issue unless they had directly spoken to the customer, so she just wrote that in, otherwise it would keep on causing problems down the line.
On the other hand I have leveraged such processes to my advantage to essentially steal my own identity. For a long time I possessed no photo-id, It was actually buying a house that proved to be the intractable problem that forced me to get a passport (I also wanted to travel) . There were numerous things that required photo ID to exist even if they had not laid eyes on it themselves. It seems rather odd to me, but somehow just the idea that I have it seems enough. Luckily I was once in a situation where I needed photo ID at a time when there was sufficient context to prove my identity by other means. A staff member fudged the system to make it work. That resulted in me acquiring a form of non-photo ID that had been recorded as being verified by photo ID. I leveraged that as a form of pseudo proof-of-photo-id for a number of years.
> I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people.
You can order legit cheques online from third party cheque printers to save money vs what banks charge for cheques, you don't need any insider access to get cheques printed.
> I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership.
Centralized vs decentralized isn't relevant.
The issue is that nobody wants to have one of the icky humans in the loop because they have the temerity to ask to be paid a salary.
Consequently, everybody tries to set up systems where everything can be done online with no in-person interactions ever required. This works, sorta, until the fraudsters start figuring out the seams.
But because you would have to give some icky human cash, everybody is fighting tooth and nail to revert back to having any humans moderating the problems.
The correct solution is to call this kind of thing what it is--fraud--and treat it as such. And the proper point for the liability are the companies and agencies that do nothing to prevent the fraud and not all the poor slobs.
A couple of nice big payouts where banks or agencies have to cough up to make everybody whole due to their negligence and suddenly all the systems will get much more stringent.
I have heard of title theft but I imagine it is more prominent is areas where an attorney is not required to process the sale of a house. Some states allow "title companies" to handle this process.
I'm not well versed, just passing along what I've heard from people over the years.
I have always heard the best way to make sure your title can't be stolen is to have a loan against the house so that a bank is involved. As long as a bank is involved, there are numerous additional hoops for something like that.
If you broaden the definition of "stolen identity" to "someone trying to scam either you or someone else by using details on your identity" (which this story more or less is) I think a fair many of us can claim this experience.
They inheritted it and have been lazy, they bought it for an investment, they bought it because they might want to build their retirement home on it, etc. Plenty of reasons why.
I know people who have bought the land they want to retire on now. (if they will or not is a different question, but that is the current plan). I know people who own hunting land that they visit one weekend a year. There are people who own land to lease to a local farmer - many farmers have too much money tied up in land and want to lease some of it from someone else to spread the risks.
If the land is expensive you wouldn't let it sit, but there is a lot of land that isn't very valuable that you can just own if you feel like it.
I grew up on a big property and when my parents moved, they divided the land and sold the part with the house with the idea that they might build a house on the empty land upon retirement.
I'm guessing at this point that they're not going to do that, so at some point I'll probably inherit some empty land.
See I can understand this. e.g. a family asset for children, a property to build a retirement home on, a hunting property, or simply a real investment.
So you’re from a different country from the author and don’t know how systems work here but you’re going to judge them for having their identity stolen? Maybe if you actually had any first hand experience you’d be able to muster some empathy. Yea things are decentralized here because we have 50 different states, many more counties, and health insurance is through a mish mash of many insurers and health providers. We are all regularly asked for the exact information needed to steal identity for basic stuff. I got a new dentist last month who has my date of birth, ssn, and home address. I’m going to tell him to stuff it and find a better dentist by, what? Calling around and asking if they require an ssn?
I have also never been the victim of identity theft but if you live here you would know luck plays a major role, always.
If you want to marinate in the superiority of you home country you are welcome to. Maybe don’t post on foreign message boards then.
Update - just tonight got a letter from a company called Conduent disclosing my medical billing records were compromised more than a year ago. Offering me “free” credit monitoring.
I think these days the easiest thing is to take a HELOC loan backed by the property. Do not withdraw money from HELOC and pay the $125/year fee. This puts a lien on the property. (The article alluded to this solution by noting these scammers avoid properties with a mortgage).
It'll work in this area of the country (Connecticut, Massachusetts,) because this is a known scam and relators and attorneys know to keep an eye out for this.
The problem is that a 4x8 plywood sign will weather very fast in New England weather. You're better off following the article's suggestion of flagging the property with the court.
> Kenigsberg received an undisclosed sum. Sky Top Partners gained a clean title to the land, finished the house and made the sale.
> Kenigsberg remains critical of the system that failed to stop the fraud and of public safety agencies that have not found the perpetrators. Under the law it's possible he could have seen the house destroyed and himself enriched more than he was. He prefers to see the case almost as an outside observer, above the fray.
Either the parties involved in the sale who should have known better, such as the relator and/or seller's attorney; or the party that took the trees down.
Furthermore, at least in Massachusetts, when you purchase property you also purchase title insurance that protects you against this. I remember very specifically, at closing, that my attorney explained that the insurance was in case someone came around with an old claim to the land.
It would be interesting to find out who and what paid out, because these scams have been going on for a bit. (There was one linked to where a property owner drove by and found a house being built on their land.)
TLDR: The real property owner contacted the town to block the building permit, and then contacted the other people involved in the sale, the documents provided by the scam artist were obviously foraged, but the sale still went through and construction started.
The other major difference between this one and the other link I posted is that the owner was very likely going to build a home on the property when they retired; unlike the other link that I posted where the property was most likely an investment and going to be sold.
A motivated attacker need only don a green safety vest and hard hat, then roll up with a white pickup truck, place some orange safety cones and take down the sign with a chainsaw.
The point is that nearly all of the people doing this don't even live in the country where the land is being sold from. A simple sign would probably be quite effective
True, but you can still do a confused deputy attack. The fraudster hires a property manager, informs them that they would like to remove the sign because they wish the list the property for sale. Either that or they con a realtor they're working with into doing it. The unknowing realtor, eager for the commission, knows a guy who can take it down.
There's always something that can happen in any scenario. Social engineering, hiring locals, deeper forms of identity theft, or worse. The possibilities never hit 0, they just become a lot less profitable (and a lot riskier) a scam to try to run.
Yes, locks aren’t there to prevent the determined thief. They are for the 99% of other opportunists that will move on to an easier target immediately when they see your lock is harder to defeat
The idea is just to avoid being the softest target. The scammers attempting this fraud don't want to do all the work you describe. They'll just move on to the next vacant property.
No, but paying someone $300 is cheap when you hope to get a check for several hundred thousand in a few months. (even if the scam is only to get the earnest money that is still a $300 investment for the final thousand or two you make - with very little work)
The realtor might pay for it or even do it themselves. It would take 5 minutes with a reciprocating saw. Or the scammer tells the realtor "never mind that" and the realtor tells the buyer.
I'm sure you could put an ad up on craigslist or fiverr or whatever, one asking for someone to take photos of the property to see if there is a sign, and another to remove it. There's plenty of people willing to do anything for money.
Note that in the article, the author says how the scammers do everything to avoid having to show up in person. That's because they are in a different country and try to commit the scam without setting foot in the US.
Owning a vacant lot far from where you live seems to come with some risks. In Hawaii, a woman found out that a house was built on the wrong lot and inspectors missed it until the completed house was being sold. I'm curious if there are other proactive measures folks could take to ensure that doesn't happen to their land.
> Reynolds was in for yet another unwelcome surprise: The developer sued her for being “unjustly enriched” by the construction of the home on her land.
> The developers’ lawyer told SFGATE in March that Reynolds appeared to be taking advantage of the developer’s mistake. “Keaau Development Partnership is the only entity that has suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of losses,” Peter Olson said. “She’s trying to exploit the situation to get money from my client and the other parties.”
I'm glad the judge laughed that one right out:
> The court has dismissed that case.
> “The clear motivation of KDP and PJC was to cut corners to reduce construction costs,” the ruling read. “... The encroachment on Lot 114 is so great that the Court finds it has caused the complete destruction of Ms. Reynolds' estate as it had been originally held and enjoyed.”
That's why such thing as "vacant land" shouldn't exist. Have a land -> do something on it. If you don't -> sell it to someone who do, or pay taxes that double every year.
In the US identity theft is easier than in other countries because financial transactions are designed to be convenient, not safe. You can sell a property you own, or move your entire Fidelity savings to another bank, all without showing up in person.
A friend owned farm land in India, he moved to Canada.
The property deed was in his name.
Someone in India, with fraudulent documents "sold" his land.
He only came to know about it when he next visited India. Unfortunately he could not do much.
There are people who will actively look through property records - if the person is not a local resident ( lives internationally ), then they are prime targets.
This was a decade ago - things have gotten a lot better with digital records and India's Universal ID system. But I did not realize, something like this was possible in the US.
This is very prevalent in South Africa, to the point there is a legal cottage industry around verifying original documents vs counterfits (down to fingerprint testing, chemical analysis of inks).
Reminds me about what my uncle told me (not India though): As a foreigner or someone local out of the country for extended period you rent a caretaker and pay them enough so they don't leave the property unattended. And build a fence around it.
> He gave me the standard line: 2-3 weeks if I hear from anyone.
> I never heard from anyone.
What is the FBI doing if they're not working on cases like this or domestic terrorism/mass shootings? We continue to have both classes of crimes in droves.
Sorry no it doesn't prove my half joking claim it only documents a single case of a high profile terrorist plot from a small group that was led by an FBI informant, containing another 4 informants and agents, and funded by the FBI in which they had trouble convicting several defendants (despite a 95%+ conviction rate normally) for some reason no clue why.
Where is the proof to your claim the FBI informant “led” the plot as opposed to being aware and involved in the same group (how informants work to get inside information)
Because a lot of scammers are overseas in countries that either won't extradite and/or cooperate with investigators. Why focus on those cases when no one will face justice?
But if you do nothing, it enables people in countries that DO extradite and cooperate to get in on the fun, too. I guess that's just being nice to our allies.
The FBI does not have a mandate to investigate all reported crimes. AFAIK, no law enforcement agency does. They triage the reports, and most reports don't get investigated.
Most mass shootings don't have a lot of the FBI to investigate. The perpetrator often dies on site, so they can't be charged with anything. FBI will likely investigate if there were any co-conspirators, and may work with ATF to determine how the perpetrator obtained the firearm(s). Many times we hear that the perpetrator was "on the FBI's radar", but most of the time, there was no unlawful conduct before the shooting, so what are they supposed to do?
You end up investigating it yourself and they still don’t care. Definitely changed my view of the cops when we got robbed by our neighbor in Buffalo, NY
What's unclear to me from the blog post is whether this is a problem for the property owner, or only for the buyers/attorneys/relators/insurances involved on the other side of the scam?
It seems like in most cases the scammer pockets the earnest money deposit and that's it, in some cases, the buyer thinks they actually bought the property but they haven't actually (how does that work in terms of the deed?)
Seems like the worst case outcome for vacant land is "free house"?
Edit: based on the comments, the problem for the property owner is the headache and cost associated with cleaning the mess up. You don't lose the property but a fraudulent title change (?) can actually end up in the registry, which can be cleaned up but is a major PITA.
> He also provided a fake email for my brother: alexanderedwardenenson@out-look.com. Notice the subtle misspelling — “Benenson” without the second “n” in the email, and the hyphenated “out-look.com” domain.
Surely you meant "'Benenson' without the “b” in the email, and the hyphenated 'out-look.com' domain"?
This is actually a really weird mistake. It's a completely different spelling mistake than in reality, and I wonder if it's an artifact of polishing the post with AI that "corrected" something that was right (or only a vague bullet point) in the original?
(ETA: Another one: referring to "hi good morning" in the images of texts when it's actually "hi <name> good evening").
For years now I have been regularly receiving unsolicited offers to buy 560 Bluefields Street SE, an undeveloped lot in Palm Bay, Florida. Whether the land is actually for sale, I have no idea; I've never been anywhere near the place, and cannot imagine why anyone would believe I owned land there. I wish I could somehow redirect the speculators who won't stop pestering me to scammers like the ones in this tale, so they would leave me in peace and all go harass each other instead.
I suspect that the speculators are scammers anyway: they never respond to my questions.
Check who used to own your place and who owns that lot now and see if any names line up.
I still receive occasional postcards from real estate mogul wannabes for a property out in Colorado (I'm in PA). The previous owners of our house moved to Colorado after they sold us their house, and I assume their name is linked to our address in some gray-market/online DB. Why they wouldn't just send purchase offers direct to the house in CO instead of what they think is the owner's primary address (ours) I don't know, but I'm sure they fire off thousands of these things and don't really care how many are accurate.
> Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life.
Is there a term for this deceitful language tactic? “Everybody knows that…” “It’s obvious that…” I think this one aggravates me the most because I feel targeted and lumped in with a group I’ve put effort into not being a part of.
Definitely raised my eyebrow. I assume he was being tongue in cheek. Reminds me of this copypasta:
“PROTIP: if you own a gun over a year without negligent discharging at least once, you aren't handling it enough. NDs are a natural part of handling weapons, just like tweaking your back is part of weightlifting and car accidents are part of driving. I ND several times a year because I actually HANDLE and know how to USE my weapons. It makes me a better firearms handler and marksman, and it's a small part of the price you pay in the sheepdog lifestyle Simple fact is, the "safety mentality" will build mental blocks in your head that will get you killed. You need to be comfortable putting your finger on the trigger and pointing the gun wherever you want no matter the time, place, or status of the weapon. Taking time to check whether the gun is loaded whenever you pick one up will serve to make you hesitate in a personal defense scenario”
Just as an aside, you can put as much effort as you want in, there is no guarantee.
My identity was stolen to take out large student loans when I was 3 years old. I learned of it when I was graduated and was trying to take out loans of my own - it was a mess.
I certainly didn't do anything risky as a baby to result in my identity being stolen but it happened anyway.
The best remedy for this is a Land Title Registry, which is a secure database of who owns a parcel of land, and a mandated verification of identity (VoI) standard. You no longer require title deeds, notaries, or title insurance. It isn't totally proof against sophisticated social engineering and gullibility of course, but it is a lot safer.
For registry titles you can also add caveats, that require sign-off from another party before transactions can occur. Unfortunately the contact address is still purely snail mail, no email or phone numbers. If you title has a bank mortgage that will appear as a caveat, requiring the debt to be discharged before it can be removed, and that also involves more ID verification.
It's not the same as forgery, and maybe less worse, but it's not a panacea.
It would still have issues as there is a lot of legacy stuff out there. We have a registry (based on the Cadastre system) and it's not uncommon for there to be disputes about the land borders which are only resolved by a judge and not simply by looking at the data. Maps are old, stuff gets lost, is poorly digitized, etc.
In Poland all transactions related to housing or land must be notarized with both buyer and seller present, the notary is supposed to check their IDs. Sadly it happened a couple of times that scammers presented a fake or stolen ID to a notary who did not recognize the forgery. Nowadays you can mark your personal number (equivalent of SSN) in the central, governmental database as restricted. This prevents notarized transactions, bank loans or issuing SIM card duplicates in your name. When you need a loan or buy a property you just log in to the system (or open the governmental app) and uncheck the checkbox.
Since you've discovered law enforcement isn't interested in enforcing the law, you need to set up your own sting and get the scammer to show up where you can arrest them after they commit a crime in your presence.
The scammer will show up to a bar in Bucharest. They are probably not even legally allowed in the U.S.
None of this scam requires the scammer to be in the U.S.
Even the New York driver's license, even if it is real, could be muled. More likely it is just a photoshop.
And even if they do show up to the meet, what are you going to do? Call the police? Will they even show up quickly? When they do, whose photo ID will the believe? Seems like a good way to spend a night at the station while the police sort some things out.
> This type of scam targets a very specific vulnerability: vacant land has no occupants to notice a for-sale sign, no neighbors who’d immediately recognize something is wrong, and closings often happen remotely.
Your vacant land could have signs which state that it is not for sale; any online listing is a scam.
It could be something small but easily spotted by a real estate agent or other interested party actually visiting the site, but not so obvious or legible in pictures.
There's a pretty interesting Japanese show called Tokyo Swindlers that covers some real estate fraud in Tokyo. Not particularly realistic as far as I know but I enjoyed it.
This is interesting! A fraudulent deed on your title doesn’t change rights, but it might require you to clarify them in court, which is costly and inconvenient. Traditional title insurance only covered addressing clouds on title that existed when you acquired, meaning post-acquisition clouds would be your problem, but supposedly there is an enhanced coverage that title insurance companies offer as well, and the decision to surface the difference (at least where I live) lands with the closing attorney… who isn’t actually required to do or say anything about this….
I wouldn't say it has nothing to do with the article. A real estate agent selling your land on behalf of someone that isn't you is roughly analogous to a bank giving credit in your name to someone who isn't you. Either way, someone who isn't you got scammed by someone else who also isn't you, but somehow this is your problem.
You know what? Fuck this guy. And that one who found a 4-bedroom house on his land that he haven't used for decades.
They didn't do anything with their land and doesn't have any plans for it for the foreseeable future. It's not like a snowblower that sits in your garage unused. It's land, a piece of planet. If you own it, you should use it for something. If you don't, return it back to people.
This doesn't make sense, earnest money would be in escrow until the title clears. The scammer would never have access to the earnest money, nor would it ever get transferred to them unless the buyer took too long to close, or didn't come up with funds?? Like the title company would almost have to be involved for this to work.
The title is often actually transfered, and it is a mess to clean up.
You could walk into a court house and submit paperwork for filing, that transfers the title - all without any kind of sale or verification. It happens.
Hmm, I guess you technically just need to convince a notary that you're the seller and with virtual closings/ mobile notaries I guess that's probably pretty easy.
But still the scammer would never see the earnest money, unless the buyer backed out outside of an option period for whatever reason. Presumably they wouldn't if the land is cheap, and they've agreed to pay cash and put earnest money down.
Is there a single case of the scammer getting a single dollar from one of these scams? My suspicion is that there isn't. (Everyone who doesn't know the answer and isn't curious should downvote me.)
Well yes, I assume that too. But the article says they'll pocket the earnest money which makes zero sense. Probably another example of someone incapable of writing an article by themselves and used an LLM.
>"7. If they get farther they’ll pocket the earnest money deposit which would have been significant in my case."
The global freight carrier storefronts around me all have notary services. I used them to notarize the documents from my last home sale; they glanced at my ID to the extent that they checked it matched the name on the paperwork, and signed off on it.
Yeah I wonder if this entire "scam" is a scammer's urban legend, where one scammer brags that they successfully executed it and all the rest try it a few times and eventually give up. Sort of like the search for pirate gold.
My realtor helped me get the photos taken down, but the Facebook ads for it are up to this day. Facebook completely ignores any and all attempts by me to report this malfeasance -- even though these ads literally have my personal home address on them!
It's a huge safety risk to me and not due to anything I did whatsoever; all I did was buy a house that was on the market and then move into it. It's a nightmare.