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And then, "Once the house was sold to the new owner for £131,000 by the person impersonating Mr Hall, they legally owned it."
The people who sold the house did not have the right to sell the house because they did not own it. The person who bought it does not own it since it was not legally sold.
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In some states you can buy a house without title insurance. I assume this is so that people who enjoy Russian roulette and jumping out of planes without parachutes can enjoy the same adrenaline rush when buying a home.
It's common to buy real estate from someone you already trust, such as a family member. You know the title was good when they bought it, so you can bet the title insurance fee (several thousand dollars) against that trust nothing fishy happened since then.
Let's say your mom lives in a house, and she sells it to you without a title. No big deal, because it was family property she got from her parents and she's lived there her entire life. Right?
Maybe not, when your grandparents children and grandchildren show up and claim their fraction of ownership of the grandparents' estate.
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The quirk is that in the UK you’re not a free man but only a subject and in the end the crown owns everything and now fuck off, filthy peasant, before the king sends his men.
Is this really different than any other country? Any government (at least in uncontested territories) can come in and tell you to fuck off, and there's really very little you can do about it.
Something similar happened in Germany recently. A house worth millions was fraudulently sold like this. The original owners got it back luckily. German video about it: https://youtu.be/TolvzYzk64c
Police: “not my problem, lol”. The joy of paying taxes.
It is pretty much how policing works in the UK. Declare it a civil matter, get it off the books as soon as possible... and that's not mentioning the mountain of police misconduct court cases that have popped up recently. Sadly the only chance of getting anything out of them is if the media get involved and hold their feet in the fire a bit.
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> I live in the USA, this year we both sold our previous home and purchased our new home without the use of signage, open houses, tours, realtors, etc. We found the house we bought and found the buyers of our old house through our network of friends. We filled out all the paperwork from forms we printed off online. Surely you left a massive amount of money on the table then, right?
Sounds like they avoided the 4-7% realtor commissions.
For what it's worth. If you own Real Property in England, even if only a Leasehold (Long Lease e.g. 99 years) you can get the Land Registry to email you about activity or, once per year, the lack of activity for your property records. https://propertyalert.landregistry.gov.uk/ Land Registry records have a sort of poor man's locking. The buyers (or in practice their solicitor) need to first perform a "Search" which wo…
This sort of scam is really common in Kenya. Walking around you'll see plenty of houses with large spray-painted letters stating 'THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE.'
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> The Land Registry is the final arbitor of who owns what in England and Wales. I don't think that's true because for instance there are still properties unregistered (as mandatory registration was phased in until 1990). Certainly it seems possible to rectify the Register, not least in case of fraud [1] Also, in English law, a valid sale of land must meet strict criteria, including being made by Deed. I am not a lawy…
> there are still properties unregistered But, if the Registry says your property is registered, and that Jim owns it, the fact you say it isn't registered doesn't trump that. You would need to persuade a Court that the Registry is wrong, and then they'd need to tell the Registry to fix that. Until both those things happen, Jim owns it. > I am not a lawyer but I don't see how the Deed can valid in this case since it…
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Seems pretty questionable as to whether due diligence was done given the first indicator neighbors had of the sale was after the transaction occurred. At least in the U.S. it's typically pretty tough to miss that a house is up for sale - signage, open houses, realtors showing up to give tours. Curious how this buyer even connected with the seller.
Off market sales are not unheard of in the USA -- my neighbor's condo was sold off-market. They were talking to a realtor to prepare to sell, and the realtor put them into touch with a buyer that paid cash for higher than they planned to list it at. So it's completely possible for a home to sell without neighbors being aware of it.
I bought my house right after it was listed on my realtors MLS system -- I had already made an offer before it ever hit Zillow or before there was a For Sale sign in the yard.
A bit long, but here is a summary from the BBC Radio programme You and Yours which has more detail than the BBC News report: Background Mike Hall (owner of the property) moves around a lot due to his work. He rents out his home, but due to COVID the property has been empty for some time. Returning to his property When Mr Hall returned to his house he could tell clearly the house has been broken into. The front door w…
A law that says a home can be fraudlently sold to an (innocent) purchaser and thus confers ownership on the purchaser, while the original owner loses ownership is simply not fit for modern times. Even if Mike Hall receives compensation, he's still lost his home and the contents in the home.
Will the compensation match the purchase price of the house and the contents in the home? And what of the innocent house buyer who bought the property? Surely it would make more sense to return the house to the original owner, and for compensation be paid to the house buyer.