[emptybits]

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

[eszed]

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.

[WarmWash]

>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.

[dizhn]

Leaked? Isn't it used in the open basically like for everything including student IDs?

[dandelany]

This was once common but is exceedingly rare these days. I'm sure exceptions exist, but nearly all Americans now treat this as a Very Secret Number.

[shakna]

Secret... But generatable since 2009. [0] 2011 randomisation slightly reduced the risk, but not by much.

As many as 1 in 7 SSNs may have been accidentally used by more than one person. [1]

Unlike Australia's TFN or the UK's VAT, SSN has no self-check, making it rather easy to just... Generate one that works.

And all an API check of the number will tell you, is what an attacker would already have: DOB and Place of Birth.

[0] https://pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0904891106

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your...

[swiftcoder]

> 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.

[reaperducer]

Last time I opened an account with Comcast they required your social security number. Same with an AT&T cell plan.

Strictly speaking they require /a/ Social Security Number, not necessarily /your/ SSN.

When I signed up for my most recent cellular service, I hesitated at giving my information to the guy in the store. I told him that since it was a pre-paid account I wasn't asking for credit, so there's no need for him to have my information.

He was OK with that, and pulled out an ID card the store keeps in a drawer for just such occasions.

Salespeople have a sales quota, not an enforce-the-rules quota.

[dizhn]

Probably something to do with checking credit history right?

[vulcan01]

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.

[WarmWash]

*Super Secret Number

[groby_b]

LOL.

Every single $&@ doctor's intake form: "We'd like to have you SSN".

[drnick1]

Yes, I have seen doctors and dentists ask for the SSN, and categorically refuse to provide it.

[rationalist]

And none of them have ever complained when I left if blank.

[m463]

I remember a friend's boyfriend lost his wallet in mexico.

she said the next few years he got many tax returns, apparently several people using his legitimate ssn.

[rationalist]

Did he store his SSN card in his wallet like so many uninformed people do?

[ghaff]

I did decades ago. Wallet was stolen. Haven't had an actual card sice.

[plagiarist]

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.

[talloaktrees]

does that mean someone was paying into your social security, essentially boosting your benefit amount when the time comes?

[stackskipton]

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.

[b112]

Social security numbers are not unique. In the old days, mistakes would happen, and some people would get the same one.

This person could have been an illegal, but there is a non-zero chance you just both had the same one. It does happen, or at least did.

[eszed]

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.

[madcaptenor]

And writing random digits has about a one-in-three chance of being a hit.

[kstrauser]

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.

[happyopossum]

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.

Anecdotes are worthless.

[m463]

I think tap-to-pay terminals that the server carries now eliminate more of this. but occasionally I have to give my card over.

On the other hand, stolen credit cards were kept by the restaurant and they got a reward.

Nowadays I don't think there is ANY checking of whose card is being used.

[WorldMaker]

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.)

[ghaff]

>tap-to-pay terminals

Becoming marginally more popular in the US but still the exception.

[m464]

That you know of

[recursive]

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.

[bigstrat2003]

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.

[jandrewrogers]

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.

[kstrauser]

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.

However, that jibes with other numbers I've seen.

https://www.security.org/digital-safety/credit-card-fraud-re...

[Marsymars]

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.

[what]

> On average I probably average a fraudulent transaction in a quarter of the years.

I’ve had one fraudulent charge in my entire lifetime. Once a quarter seems insane. Are you putting your card info into random websites or something?

[buildsjets]

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.

[recursive]

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.

[Lammy]

This exact thing happened to me once at the hotel bar in the Santa Clara Convention Center / Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.

[kstrauser]

Not especially, I don't think. It's incredibly common according to everything I see online.

[recursive]

I guess I'm just lucky.

[ghaff]

"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.

[afpx]

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.

[rationalist]

Mine was cloned at a very high-end restaurant in Austin, TX.

[Hardwired8976]

Handing your credit card to pay is still such a foreign concept to me

[Nextgrid]

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.

[Boltgolt]

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

[krick]

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[b00ty4breakfast]

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?

[pixl97]

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.

[happyopossum]

Swimming at a gas station pump would be uncomfortably lethal.

[dghlsakjg]

I wonder how well you would have to be able to swim to overcome the density/buoyancy difference if swimming in a pool of gasoline?

[rationalist]

It depends how long you can hold your breath. I imagine many people would be overwhelmed by the fumes before they got very far.

[swiftcoder]

It's a pretty drastic density difference. I think an Olympic swimmer would have a hard time staying above the surface.

[pixl97]

Ah, 12 hours later I log back in to see skimmers got autocorrected to swimmers.

[bregma]

Gasoline fight!

[kstrauser]

I am, but some of these events were when I was traveling through smaller Midwest towns. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to it.

In any case, it hasn't happened again since I started using tap to pay whenever possible.

[consp]

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.

[bookofjoe]

Remember when credit cards required your signature on the back?

[wildzzz]

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.

[kstrauser]

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.

[Cthulhu_]

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)

[ghaff]

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" :-)

[projektfu]

It's not legally binding if you didn't sign it, but that won't stop someone from trying to claim that you did.

[jjmarr]

Unlike most common law jurisdictions, the United States doesn't have a central land registry due to lobbying from the title insurance industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#United_States

[dcrazy]

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.

[skissane]

> 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.

[ghaff]

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.)

[weinzierl]

"No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry [..]"

Fascinating, how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth?

I feel the answer to this is also crucial to understanding OP. It could be a minor annoyance or the real possibility to lose your land.

[parsimo2010]

> 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.

[semiquaver]

  > You can't hold it against us if that happens

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.

[parsimo2010]

I was getting ready to debate you, but I'll admit that I'm mostly wrong about title insurance.

Special warranty deeds only cover the current seller, but title insurance can defend against prior ownership claims. I will note that just because title insurance guarantees they will defend against ownership claims, they don't guarantee it will be settled in a particular way. There's a theoretical possibility that an agreement can't be reached that keeps you in the house you thought you bought legally- like in this story the buyers got their money back but didn't keep the house that wasn't theirs https://www.thetitlereport.com/Articles/Title-Insurance-at-W...

[sidewndr46]

I've read the terms of title insurance and no, you can't hold them liable if it turns out you don't get the property as intended. It's basically useless.

[raini]

patio11 wrote a bunch about this: (https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/working-title-insuran...)

[Aeolun]

I couldn’t keep reading this. Why is that thing so insane?

[ghaff]

Because everything about real estate is insane if you peel back the covers. I've just been going through this and I couldn't tell you how many pages of documents I've had to go through. And this isn't even a new purchase. It's just trust and neighbor agreements (in part because the guy I bought the property from 25 years messed up some stuff).

[pdonis]

> how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth?

There is: the county clerk in the county where the land is located.

[skissane]

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.

[pdonis]

> in the Torrens system, whatever the government records say are final

First, it doesn't seem like that's always the case, based on another post upthread talking about a land ownership case that went to the high court because of an error in the government's records.

Second, since there is no single government for the entire world, any government trying to implement a Torrens system is still going to face the problem of events happening outside its jurisdiction that its records do not and cannot contain, which affect ownership of property in its jurisdiction. So there cannot be a "single source of truth" in the sense you appear to be using the term, even in the Torrens system.

[sidewndr46]

It's also entirely possible for a judge to just change the records because they don't like them. It's pretty common in Texas to see deed restrictions removed if the local government doesn't want them on there for example.

[xenadu02]

FWIW even in the US system the courts usually won't order someone off land they are living on or using even if this were the case. At worst they would order compensation be paid - which is what title insurance actually covers.

Many states have a statute of limitations anyway. If you live on the land and pay the property taxes for N years everything else becomes irrelevant. Either the title was transferred to you or you squatted on abandoned land for N years: in both cases it becomes yours.

[mandevil]

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.

[pdonis]

> at least in some places in the US that's actually just a log of some kinds of transactions

That's true--but as I pointed out just now in response to another post, since there is no single government having jurisdiction over the entire world, there is always the possibility of events happening outside a given jurisdiction that affect the ownership of property in that jurisdiction. No system of records in a jurisdiction can completely prevent that.

[mcherm]

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.

[ggm]

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.

Torrens is great but CAP theory still applies.

[bombcar]

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!

[cmiles74]

The federal government never enumerated the power to manage a national credit agency and yet we have several.

[peaseagee]

The federal government doesn't manage any national credit agencies.

[cmiles74]

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.

[dcrazy]

That’s not what’s being discussed. In other countries that operate under what’s called the Torrens title system, the government maintains an authoritative central land registry. If you wind up in a legal dispute about ownership of a piece of land, the judge looks at the government books and is bound by what they say (with minimal exceptions).

We cannot have such a national registry in the United States. We could have 50 independent ones, but the few states that tried it have given up and reverted.

[IcyWindows]

Since title events, like marriages, can happen outside the US, that only helps a little.

[throw0101a]

> 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:

* https://www.ontario.ca/page/overview-land-registry

* https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/real-esta...

That hasn't stopped fraud (attempts):

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/three-charged-stolen-...

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64547396

[nine_k]

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.

[wrs]

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.

[ghaff]

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.

[anjel]

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

[bluGill]

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)

[skissane]

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.

[sidewndr46]

But how do they verify your identity? Most places I've lived used nearly useless forms of identity verification

[bluGill]

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.

[ryandrake]

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.

[the_fall]

There is a database. The insurance covers things that aren't in the database. Claims are exceptionally rare, so it's pretty cheap.

[IcyWindows]

For the risk assumed by the title insurance, it's one of the most overpriced insurance around.

[jerf]

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.

[happyopossum]

> 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.

[rtpg]

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.

[0]:https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181121/p2a/00m/0na/00...

[a2tech]

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.

[happyopossum]

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.

[x0x0]

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.

[the_fall]

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.

[NoSalt]

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.

[Lerc]

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.

[Marsymars]

> 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.

[bsder]

> 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.

[brightball]

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.

[dclowd9901]

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.

[rwmj]

I also wondered why someone would own an empty lot in another town for years on end and neither build on it nor sell it.

[rationalist]

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.

[bluGill]

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.

[Marsymars]

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.

[jandrewrogers]

Optionality. There is also a lot of cheap land in the US, so it often isn't a large investment.

[emptybits]

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.

[buildsjets]

Buy low, sell high.

[eduction]

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.

[eduction]

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.