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Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#211

Post by bunnie »

mihaaly wrote: post #163
tialaramex wrote: post #39

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…

It is always nice being vigilant for all and every possible scam and fraud out there coming our ways, being ready and prepared for whatever comes from whatever direction and for whatever target of ours, going after every suspicious matters we encounter or believe we encounter, being suspitious against as much as possible preparing ourselves for all kinds that could happen out there, but shouldn't be required. If it i…

I have to agree with this. A little O/T, but reminds me a bit of how US patents are handled. If you're able to constantly monitor patent publications (the stage where patents are disclosed but still in review), it is cheap and easy to challenge applications. But good luck trying to get any work done while trying to to keep up with the deluge of patent publications!

If you miss your chance to challenge the patent before it issues, the cost to protest goes way up, even if your arguments would have been just as valid during the publication phase.

I get that the system is trying to reward vigilance, but it punishes people who put more time into sharing ideas than protecting them, especially considering the PTO does not search most modern repositories of open source for prior art.

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#212

Post by torstenvl »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #92
dmoy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how Title law works in the jurisdiction. I don't know how it works in this part of the UK, but in many states in the US, the buyer would left holding the bag - the original homeowner would keep the property. It's one reason in the US that most property sales include a purchase of title insurance.

> I don't know how it works in this part of the UK, but in many states in the US, the buyer would left holding the bag - the original homeowner would keep the property Different ways of dealing with the problem of fraudulent transfer and property records. In the U.S., the risk is the buyer's. If the property was fraudulently transferred, the transaction is mutable. This makes the sureness of ownership, as well as the…

It isn't about property and power, though. It's about knowledge and power. The buyer knows there's a transaction being contemplated. The buyer knows how to contact the seller and/or their agents. The owner does not. The predominant U.S. system requires buyers to guard against known unknowns. The U.K. system requires owners to guard against unknown unknowns. It's a least-cost-avoider problem, and it has a clear answer.

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#213

Post by kube-system »

lbriner wrote: post #42
krisoft wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key problem is that it is a civil matter. No. The criminal matter, as alleged, is that someone scammed the buyer, the solicitors and the Land Registry into believing that they are who they were not. That is not a civil matter, it is I believe fraud. If a bloke sells their house, but then gets cold feet, or not happy with the compensation that is a civil matter. This is not what is alleged.

Yes, it is unclear why the police told him it was civil since fraud is "misrepresentation for a gain", which the fraudulent seller presumably did. Maybe the argument is that without proof that the fraudulent seller made a gain, it is merely a Tort and not Fraud?

Because there are three parties, and only one of them committed a crime. The one who currently has the house and the one who lost the house have not -- their dispute is civil. The criminal was long gone by the time the police arrived.

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#214

Post by lifeisstillgood »

UK house owner - just signed up to the Land Registry alert system. Which has to be a record from not knowing something existed to signing up in four minutes.

1. The registry seriously refuses passwords that do not have alphanumeric characters only. Did not try Unicode.

2. Most of the UK is not in the land registry - it only is compulsory for land sold IIRR since the 1990s and generally has records going back to early 1900s. If someone owns land from before then, no-one publically knows who they are or who owns it. As most land in the UK is held by government or aristocracy and they have not needed to sell it for centuries we don't know who owns what.

3. This simply cannot be the first time - something this sophisticated, the original fraudster did not so this the first time now. How common is this? I mean see above - the land registry has a monitoring service for this ?

4. Thinking about it, I just added a monitoring account with just an email. If I create a new account and try to add $TargetAddress I find out if it is monitored - and I suspect that that is not going to count as a monitoring event !

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#215

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

mdoms wrote: post #139
so_throwaway wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not an expert on British law what makes you feel able to make such a confident and surprising claim?

This is Hacker News. Confidently espousing on subjects we know little about is what we do.

Pretty sure it's not specific to HN. Any social media has this behavior.

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#216

Post by lazide »

wins32767 wrote: post #199
rectang wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the absurdly unjust system that needs monitoring. It's not "just the way the world works", because it doesn't have to be the way that it is, and it should not be the way that it is. A system that requires constant, complicated intervention to function properly ensures that those with the resources and background to know that they have to exercise constant vigilance against malfeasance will come out ahe…

In general that's true, but in this particular case I'm not sure it follows. This is a very infrequent occurrence, which is why it made the news. From a societal perspective, further investment in security here is probably a net drag since all those security measures will also apply to every valid sale and there are vastly more of those. The pot of money that pays out to victims of fraud doesn't make those people who…

It is a infrequent yet catastrophic risk however for everyone that owns any land or property in the UK - and it would definitely keep me up at night if I had any property there!

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#217

Post by karatinversion »

koonsolo wrote: post #194

It's weird that people get identified by their driver's license. Don't they have digital ID cards that are better suited for veryfying who is who?

The UK is funnily backwards about some things. In particular, they have neither national ID cards, nor a population registry. You end up sending utility bills to the government as proof of address.

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#218

Post by lazide »

jacquesm wrote: post #208
tialaramex wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Doesn't the registry have some level of 'duty of care'?

Seems like the ID was pretty convincing, and the real owner (assuming the paper did their due diligence!) wasn’t there at the property - so everyone involved may have done a decent amount of checking, but it wasn’t enough because the fraudster knew how to play the system to get through the normal hurdles. It does happen.

Sounds like a court needs to dig in and figure out what is going on for sure.

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#219

Post by conductr »

drfuchs wrote: post #126
tantalor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what if something fishy happened before they sold it to you, but it isn't discovered until after? Does their title insurance still cover it? For instance, if their original purchase turns out to not have been legitimate to begin with for some reason.

Yes, title insurance is a single premium but gives the owner forever coverage. This is essentially the purpose, to give the buyer confidence that they are protected for anything that may have happened that they wouldn't know about, because the seller may not even know about it and potentially it happened 100s of years ago.

Where this gets kind of crazy is if you own a property and have title insurance on it from when you bought it, then you do a refinance, you're often required to buy the insurance again because that original policy ends.

All said, the loss ratio of title insurance companies is extremely low compared to other types of insurances. But in some places it's cost is fairly high (eg Texas) and it's mostly to do with strong political interests / lobbying

Re: Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'

#220

Post by lazide »

zarzavat wrote: post #108
mytailorisrich wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes I expect that, if pressed, the courts would void the entire transaction and restore the property. The land registry may be the arbiter of who currently owns what, but the courts are the arbiter of what "happened" according to the law. Otherwise it sets an absurd precedent. If it was not some man's house but a critical piece of infrastructure, the courts are not going to stand idly by and let some random person ta…

Who pays back the 150k uk pounds?
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