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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'

#291

Post by krisoft »

mcguire wrote: post #134
cameronh90 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently buying a house in the UK and it involved rather a lot of ID verification. I had to provide, to the bank, estate agent, mortgage broker and lawyers, the following: passport, driving license, utility bills, payslips, source of funds, bank statements, app-based liveness verification and more. However, in the event of an off-market cash transaction, a lot fewer parties are involved - potentially just a conveyan…

" app-based liveness verification " Ok, now you have me curious. Whazzat?

Imagine that you run a business where it is important to properly check the ID of your customer. You need to know two things: the photographic ID matches the person, and there is a real living person present there, not just some scammer who stole the ID.

In real life this is a simple task. You look at the photo on the ID, then you look at the person and check that they match. You also would immediately notice if something is weird, like they are wearing a lifelike mask, or they are a plastic doll.

Why does this not work for businesses then? There can be two reason: either they want to check the customers ID remotely through the internet, or the customer is present in their office but the business does not trust their own employees to check them.

Why would a business not trust their own employees? Because the company employees are in the best position to perpetuate some fraud on the business. Very often clerks receive some direct compensation or bonus based on how many new customers they subscribe for example, and if not properly checked this can incentivise the employees invent fake customers for you for example.

So you want to check the ID of a person in some way you can conduct remotely without trusting anyone physically present. Simple! You ask for an image of the ID and a photo of the customer, then a remote employee or machine learning model can decide if they match up.

But there is a problem with that! Anyone who is sophisticated enough to scam you with a fake ID will also be able to give you a matching photo. Ugh oh.

How do you solve this? You ask for the ID as previously, but instead of asking for a photo you ask for a video of the customer. Maybe you even flash the phone’s screen while recording the video with random colours and ask the customer to read up randomly selected digits. This way you can be sure that the video is not just some previous stock footage, or plastic doll or who knows. This is what is being refered to as “app-based liveness verification”

Now of course you might notice that this is an arms race. You make a better verification tool, and the scammers make a better scam. I bet that there is already someone out there training a neural network to create an animated deep fake which is convincing and can reflect the flashing colours appropriately and can read up the digits too. Likewise there is someone who is working on detecting that. What matters is that the business is trying to keep the cost of deception high enough so it is not worth doing at scale.

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

#292

Post by lozenge »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #247
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If you consider each country's history with respect to property and power, it makes sense. Could you elaborate on that, please? I don't know which historical aspects you're referring to.

My interpretation - the UK was about having a few gentry owning all the land and a lot of peasants that just work on the land. The US was about giving each settler a Homestead of previously unowned land (Natives not being considered capable of owning land, because racism). So, a registry would be easy to operate in the UK, but the US was too big and poorly connected and had too many land owners to make that viable.

One example is Ayn Rand who said that Natives weren't using land productively and therefore weren't really owners of it.

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

#293

Post by abjr »

conductr wrote: post #219
drfuchs wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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.

That's when you ask for the re-issue rate.

http://www.insuranceqna.com/title-and-mortgage-insurance/wha...

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

#294

Post by tzs »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #5

I'm in the US. What I see is that stolen+sold property tends to belong to the original owner, not the purchaser. Is it different in the UK?

But the house wasn't really stolen. It was fraudulently sold.

You might think that such quibbling cannot possibly matter, and maybe it doesn't in the UK, but in the US it can.

Here's a case from 2008 in Washington state [1].

Company X leased a car to Y.

Y forged documents to show X had released their interest in the car and then Y sold the car to innocent buyer Z.

X sued to recover the car from Z.

Washington law (RCW 10.79.050) states "All property obtained by larceny, robbery or burglary, shall be restored to the owner; and no sale, whether in good faith on the part of the purchaser or not, shall divest the owner of his rights to such property".

But there was no larceny, robbery, or burglary in this case so that did not apply.

Z got to keep the car.

[1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/wa-court-of-appeals/1210407.html

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

#295

Post by iammisc »

toss1 wrote: post #233
amerkhalid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s not correct in the US. If you buy stolen property unknowingly, it can be taken away from you. Had my TV stolen, it ended up in a pawn shop. Luckily, I had receipt and serial number. There was some paperwork and court order but pawnshop had to return TV to me.

Yup, that is also why there are laws against Receiving Stolen Property [1] in the US. This is defined as: >>According to general receiving stolen property laws, it is a crime to accept or purchase any property which you believe or have actual knowledge that it was obtained through illegal means, such as theft. However, receiving stolen property is its own separate crime and thus should not be confused with the simila…

Key word is believe or have actual knowledge.

If you bona fide thought it was legit it's okay.

The commenter above mentioned pawn shops, a highly regulated activity. Had the tv already been sold, he would have had no recourse to the new owners. The pawn shop may still be liable, depending on how the jurisdiction handles pawn shops.

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

#296

Post by horsawlarway »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #229
horsawlarway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh - depends on why you're buying the house. There are a lot of rental properties for sale with "tenants in place" in my area. If you want to live in it, then yes - Ensure seller is responsible for removal. If you want to continue renting the property then a lot of times it's easier for both parties to complete the sale and then let the current rental contract conclude before doing reno/construction.

If there's a lease in place, that lease continues unabated. If the new owner wants the tenants out, the tenants have to agree to break the lease. Otherwise the tenants can continue to live there until their lease runs out. It doesn't matter whether these are the best options for the owner(s). They're the only options.

Yes - I understand how leasing works (although you can absolutely build a termination clause in for either/all sides).

That's why I say make it the current owners responsibility if you don't want tenants there: They must either invoke their termination clause (and usually pay a fee), or offer to buy the tenants out, or pay you some penalty fee for every day the house remains occupied after sale.

Alternatively - if you plan on gutting the place anyways, and their lease is due to expire in less than 6 months: Leave them in place and keep the property bringing in some income while you schedule contractors and line up work.

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

#297

Post by K0balt »

_jal wrote: post #149
rectang wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's messed up — it pushes the blame onto the victims for not monitoring.

Rather similar to "identity theft", the strange name for a particular form of (usually bank) fraud.

It’s called identity theft to make it more the victims problem. If it was bank fraud, the bank would definitely have to deal with all aspects. As it is, consumers get a big chunk of the burden.

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

#298

Post by throwaway0a5e »

kelnos wrote: post #152
rectang wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's messed up — it pushes the blame onto the victims for not monitoring.

Please don't throw around accusations of victim-blaming like this. No one is claiming that the victim is at fault. But I do think it's useful information to pass along that it's possible to get notified of things like this before they become big problems. It's like... it's not my fault if I get mugged at 3am in a part of the city known for being full of violent crime, but I also should have known better than to be wa…

> Please don't throw around accusations of victim-blaming like this.

You're pissing into a hurricane. Complaining of victim blaming at the slightest opportunity will persist so long as it is rewarded with up-votes.

You get what you incentivize.

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

#299

Post by jessriedel »

toss1 wrote: post #233
amerkhalid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s not correct in the US. If you buy stolen property unknowingly, it can be taken away from you. Had my TV stolen, it ended up in a pawn shop. Luckily, I had receipt and serial number. There was some paperwork and court order but pawnshop had to return TV to me.

Yup, that is also why there are laws against Receiving Stolen Property [1] in the US. This is defined as: >>According to general receiving stolen property laws, it is a crime to accept or purchase any property which you believe or have actual knowledge that it was obtained through illegal means, such as theft. However, receiving stolen property is its own separate crime and thus should not be confused with the simila…

Knowingly receiving stolen property is a different thing.

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

#300

Post by throwaway0a5e »

pydry wrote: post #131
White_Wolf wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second that. If I'd end up losing my house to something like this... Let's just say nobody would get it by the end of it.

If you're implying what I think you're implying it would probably end with you in prison.

Part of his point is that's not really much of a deterrent if you've already lost everything.
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