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Identity Thieves Steal Homes
westcoaster004 writes "Identity thieves in Canada have begun targeting the homes of their victims. Recently, several cases of mortgage and title fraud have involved identity theft; several individuals have had their houses sold without their knowledge. Ontario's land-registry system does not currently protect homeowners from such fraud, but instead favors banks, mortgage companies, and purchasers. The provincial government is however working to solve the problem."
I think they stole the article, too.
ntario's land-registry system does not currently protect homeowners from such fraud, but instead favors banks, mortgage companies, and purchasers
And you wonder why we call Canada our 51st state.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Maybe someone should start selling off the titles for ontario's land titles departments or of their local members of parliament.
Pretty sure you'd find their response to these actions would change rather quickly methinks.
Where people would just walk off with monuments. Truth is stranger than fiction it seems
Monstar L
it was our suburb.
I'd go for drawing and quartering someone who did this.
This is quite new and has just hit the news this summer. The provincial government is acting quickly and I'm guessing it won't be a problem by Christmas.
If someone registers a mortgage against your property it is because the bank thinks they are you. That means the bank is responsible for correctly identifying the owner of the house. If they are not sufficiently careful to correctly identify the real owner of the property, they are negligent. They can be sued for negligence. That can get a jury involved. There's no jury in Canada that will believe that a bank, who participates in the theft of your house, wasn't negligent. My wag is that we won't have many more cases of house theft because the banks will see the writing on the wall and change their procedures.
The government is complicit in the crime if they are going to enforce the results of the crime, as they have apparently done in this case. The victim was correct to refer to "lawlessness."
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
How come it is possible to sell something that does not belong to you there ? In many other countries, the selling would be simply void.
Yeah it's scary, but the mechanism is very simple.
Fraudulently transfer ownership to the criminal.
Sell the property to a third party, take the money and run.
The thing I don't understand is how the owner loses it. If someone steals your car and you can prove you're the origional owner you get it back. With a house it's quite simple to prove you're the owner.
It must be an interesting loophole to avoid this. Otherwise people wouldn't care. If someone comes to my door claiming they own my house I should tell them to screw off. If I purchase a house in one of these scams, it's why I have title insurance.
I also don't understand how they can't track the hundreds of thousands of dollars back to the fraudsters? If they can't track this money, why do they require reporting of all transactions over $10k? It obviously doesn't work.
The Notary Public who notarized the old guy's supposed signature on the Power of Attorney is the one who screwed up and should have to pay. It's HIS job to positively verify the identidy of the signer - and he obviously did not do that. Title should be transferred back to the original owner and the (innocent) buyer should be made whole by the Notary's malpractice insurance policy.
Identity thieves in Canada have begun targeting the homes of their victims.
It isn't new, it's been going on for years. It's just starting to hit the media. It made the news recently in Ontario because identity thieves falsely sold a house out from under the real owner. A bank issued a mortage against the house, and when no one made payments, tried to reposses the house. The appeal courts ruled in favour of the bank, saying that even though the house sale was fraudulent, the real owner is still responsible for the payments. The Ontario government is working to change the law.
Another common fraud is to buy a run-down house for 75k. Get some building permits, then sell it to someone else for 100k. Get some building permits, then sell it to someone else for 150k. Get some building permits, then sell it to someone else for 200k.
Then, get a mortgage on the property for 175k. The bank/mortgage lender sees all these transactions documenting the increase in the value of the house, and in the overheated housing market, doesn't want to lose the business. Lots of people do this legitimately - buy a run-down house, fix it up, and sell.
Of course, none of the transactions were real, the house was being bought & sold between the same group of people, and it is still the same run-down house worth 75k. People tend to have less sympathy for the bank, they usually say the bank should have sent a home inspector to examine the property.
> Ontario's land-registry system does not currently protect homeowners from such fraud
Odd. If it's not yours, you can't sell it. At least, that's usually the rule.
I think the mere existence of malpractice insurance causes a lot of negligence. If the notary is the one who screwed up, then he/she alone should pay for it. Take away his house if he doesn't have enough savings, but let him suffer personally the same way the innocent victims suffered. If it's just like "oh, shit, I will pay 5% more for insurance next year because of this", that may not be enough incentive to be more careful.
Malpractice insurance may be necessary because the negligent professional may not have enough savings to pay for the damage caused, but he should be liable to pay back the full insured value to the insurance company, even if he needs to spend the rest of his life in a hand to mouth existence.
Was there any point to that post other than to spam Google with your link to "windows admin tools"?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
They didn't mention any of these people having title insurance. Isn't that pretty much manditory when you purchase a home. If the defrauded buyers were insured, couldn't they file a claim, and use that money to pay off the mortgage?
Ontario's land-registry system does not currently protect homeowners from such fraud, but instead favors banks, mortgage companies, and purchasers. If I truly loose my property because of shit like this I'd burn it down before leaving it to the bank...
That's a slower, more painful death.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
we should call them 'home pwn3rs'
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
The thing that baffles me about this fraud is who the heck buys a house without first taking a walkthrough. The guy who lives there is going to tell you what is up, perhaps strung with profanity. Heck even if it wasn't fraud the guy could be storing toxic waste in the basement for all you know.
Whomever is doing it has been remarkably successful - why do people keep on giving mod-points to these asinine comments?
I think the lawyers in question are responsible because they did not do the proper due diligence. Also if such a thing happens, the lawyers better have insurance against title fraud, because the original home-owner, who is now a victim can sue the lawyers, since they did not do their job properly. Also the lender itself probably can be sued for not doing their due diligence.
It was not the homeowner who got scammed, the homeowner (and the buyer) are victims, but it is the lawyers and the lenders that got scammed. And since it is their job not to get scammed, they should be made responsible.
Of-course if the system is so insecure that it is easy for the lawyers and the lenders to get scammed, then it is the government's job to fix the current problem with the victims and to secure the system.
In these cases the identity of the homeowners were stolen (there is more than one case.) Their signatures were forged, fake power of attorney were created. There should be an investigation firuging out exactly what happened, step by step and identifying the steps that made it possible for identity to be stolen. Then something should be done to fix those steps in the home buying process.
In this case I hope the Ontario government actually steps in and helps the homeowners to get their homes back, the buyers should get their downpayments back and the lenders probably will collect insurance.
You can't handle the truth.
This has absolutely nothing to do with YRO...
"Uh, you can't outsmart carnival folk. They're the cleverest folk in the world. Just look at the way they sucker regular folks with those crooked games."
. htm
http://animatedtv.about.com/cs/other/ht/htcarnies
This type of fraud (a rogue purchases property from an innocent vendor, flips it to an innocent buyer, then absconds with the money, leaving the property with unclear title) has been around at least as long as there has been the law of contract. The legal doctrine is one of "Mistake". Here is a more recent case from the U.K. about Mistake in contract, invovling a similarly fraudulent transaction, but with a car instead of a house: Hudson v. Shogun [2001] EWCA Civ 1001.
A choice quote from that British case: "It may seem remarkable that the law governing the consequences of a fraud as common as this is still in doubt, but it is." This would apply to all of the jurisdictions deriving their law from British common law, including Australia, Canada and the U.S.
Here is an American viewpoint (the Law Site on MSN) on the issue of Mistake
but I am a licensed Real Estate Broker in New York state (something I did in the process of earning my CE degree). In NY State at least and most lien theory states this sort of fraud is next to impossible especially if your bank still holds a mortgage lien on your property. In a lien theory state the bank never owns your property they only have a lien against it and while they can sell the lien they can NEVER sell your property unless they go into foreclosure proceedings in which case you should have paid your bills.
Furthermore lien theory states make it difficult to commit title fraud because for a title transfer to occur everyone who may have a lien on a particular propery (govt, bank, plumber etc...) has to have their lien satisfied. I'd love to see someone commiting fraud convince a bank that they should relinquish their 250K+ lien on a property they stand to make big $$ on by either collecting the interest of selling on the secondary mortgage market (fat chance).
As far as title/mortgage fraud goes I really wonder what kind of screwed up system Canada has. A quick search for "real estate" "title fraud" is completely filled with links about canadian real estate and almost no other country. Not that I have anything in particular against Canada, half my family lives there, but that is very telling.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
I'm a real esate agent in the US. I don't think that scam would be as easy to carry off here. Loan companies have less power and would probably be out of luck. When people default on loans here the loan companies often have to work for over a year to get title to the home and resell it. It is so expensive for them that they will often sell a home with a poorly performing loan at a steep discount just to get out without paying all the legal fees. The details vary from state to state.
Even if a homeowner found themselves in this situation, instead of petitioning a central government agency (which has now power except to record deeds), they'd have a ton of private parties exposed to the transaction to sue, including private title insurers, covering the owner's interest in the property, a meaty legal target indeed.
this http://imagesocket.com/ view/ canada_the_great.png
yay tim hortons ... oh wait ... wendy's bought it? thats why my apple fritters are square now? because "we don't cut corners"?
and whats with all the donuts nowadays made of sawdust.
I love when the yanks post this on the once-a-month-bad-news-from-Canada-story. Wake up, you get bad news as much as twice a day.
In Canada, they changed something in the Laws during the early 1990's that basically legalized the purchase of stolen property, if the property is purchased thru a legit registered business.
The typical case would be a victim of robbery that kept all receipts in a safe at the bank, then noticed some of their stolen goods lying in a pawn shop shelf. They would then notify the the police, receipts and other proofs in hand, but would meet resistance from the pawn shop owners. Anyhow, in most cases, the most valuable merchandise was already gone and could not be traced. As I recall, pawn shop owners felt that the Law shafted them by forcing them to return stolen goods to their rightful owner, after already handing money in exchange. What did Canada do? They changed the Law. Once a pawn shop has paid money in exchange for some valuables, they legally own them, even if you can prove that they stolen goods that belong to you.
A friend in Montreal lost a whole recording studio worth of equipment that way, right after the law was changed. Showed up in various pawn shops, noticed that the serial number of serveral items there matched those of material declared as stolen to the police a week before... only to hear the police say that he could not recover them, because the Law protects pawn shop owners and tramples the rights of stolen property's rightful owners. his story made the evening news in Montreal, back then.
So, however grossly unfair as this story about stolen houses might be, it remains consistent with Canada's position of protecting the buyer, in total contempt of victims of criminal acts such as property title theft or robbery.
For what it's worth, I think that proper remedy would be to:
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Did you get a good deal?
A really really good deal?
Are the rightful owners still mad at you?
Heh, but he didn't realise that Slashdot adds a rel="nofollow" attribute to the link...
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Hee, I thought nofollow only applied to links in sigs :D nice.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
If someone steals your car, or robs your house of some consumer electronics, or something like that... it is one thing. But if someone steals someone elses house, which for most people represents the bulk of their life savings and what they have invested their economic future in... I wouldn't be supprised if people got very violent. People with nothing to lose are very dangerous. I wouldn't want to be the people living in a stolen house... or the lawyer or bank representative that brokered the deal. This is the perfect recipe for some sort of nasty violence. Ontario better change that law quickly.
So - yes, they make sure the owner owns it, not "is this the owner"...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It's hard to see how the Title Insurance company shouldn't reimburse the buyer's promptly. It's their job to make sure the transaction's legit. Years to get compensation? Who the hell is running the Title Companies? The mob? Or maybe politicians?
Disclaimer: just a puny US real estate agent.
:-)
It doesn't help anyone if we throw around terms like "mine" and "yours" when dealing with real estate. I only know basic US real esate law. The idea of "it's my house" is intuitive. It is also false. (here)
Land is scarce, especially land in proximity to other desirable land. When you "have title," I emphasize, "have title" to land, you have certain rights over that land, possession, enjoyment (use in any legal manner), control, exclusion (keep others from entering), and disposition (transfer interest). You also have rights to the air above, ground beneath, and rights to use adjacent bodies of water.
Because land is so scarce, it is valuable, and these rights are partitioned in all kinds of ways. The rights are not only sold piecemeal, groups of the rights can be divided piecemeal between multiple people with different kinds of transfer abilities.
And have I mentioned various kinds of leases and wills?
One of the functions of local government is to maintain a database of who has title to what land in a given area. But these rights can be partitioned with such complexity that it is a serious undertaking to answer the question of exactly who has which land interests on a given parcel, which may itself have been divided!
So what is the local government to do? They maintain a database of "deeds". Deeds are contracts which transfer rights from one party to another, or correct errors (spelling anyone?) in previous deeds.
In other words, title is determined by examining a natural language log structure filesystem. Futhermore, the records in these databases only go back, what, 60 - 100 years? You think you own your home, but there may be a valid legal interest infringing yours.
Do you see why you need title insurance?
My intution is that they tried to simplify things in Canada. The simplification was probably to "clarify" ownerships by giving the government more authority to assert exactly who has title. This "favors" the mortagage company in these exploited cases. I think the intention was to reduce risk for everyone involved. Inadvertently they have introduced a legal vulnerability.
And you thought your OS vendor was a little slow to respond.
Tell me, would YOU want to have a job where a mistake could cost you everything you own and 90% of what you earn for the next 20 years?
Would programming a computer qualify as such a job? Like if you make a mistake and not know about someone's troll patent and after your product becomes successful in the market someone claims you infringed if if there is prior art and you get to spend the next several years fighting in court?
Would designing a TV set qualify? Would Philo Farnsworth qualify?
Or is it that is these case they didn't even make a mistake?
"the power of attorney that had been notarized by a North York lawyer named Sheldon Caplan"
Reviczky should just sue that lawyear for at least the sum of the house + what he could have made from it.
This lawyer had crossed the law...
there is no issue with my network
If you unknowingly buy stolen property, although you yourself are not guilty of any crime, you will be _REQUIRED_ to surrender it. If you are out of pocket for the incident, you can sue the person you bought it from... although even winning offers no guarantee you can get all your money back. Odds are, however, they will go to jail for a while, at least... if that's any consolation.
Caveat Emptor. Always.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
After all, isn't Canada the last known whereabouts of famous foreclosure mortgage robber baron Snidely Whiplash?
I thought the mountie always got his man...
Is this landlord favoring policy possibly a British legacy?
Another common fraud is to buy a run-down house for 75k. Get some building permits, then sell it to someone else for 100k. Get some building permits, then sell it to someone else for 150k. Get some building permits, then sell it to someone else for 200k.
Then, get a mortgage on the property for 175k. The bank/mortgage lender sees all these transactions documenting the increase in the value of the house, and in the overheated housing market, doesn't want to lose the business. Lots of people do this legitimately - buy a run-down house, fix it up, and sell.
Of course, none of the transactions were real, the house was being bought & sold between the same group of people, and it is still the same run-down house worth 75k. People tend to have less sympathy for the bank, they usually say the bank should have sent a home inspector to examine the property.
Which is why mortgage holders and morgage insurance companies like CMHC and Genstar, at least here in Calgary, are now requiring that a professional appraise the property before the conclusion of the transaction. That is what happened to me just recently after I bought a condo. My offer reflected fair market value and was slightly over the asking price on a year old condo and CMHC still insisted on an appraisal.
I read almost two years ago that Calgary was the leading city in Canada for mortgage fraud because prices were rising so rapidly that banks and insurance companies just accepted inflated prices as a matter of course. After losing a ton of money, they began to require appraisals as well as moving to something called the "Western Protocol" when closing a mortgage. The Western Protocol does away with title insurance as unscrupulous lawyers were apparently aware that in most mortgage fraud cases banks were pursuing claims against the title insurers while the lawyers were getting away scot free. That is how my lawyer explained it to me, at least.
Canadian juries can be quite activist. Most people think juries must base their decisions only on the law. That's not the case. The classic case of juries deciding on the morality of a case (rather than the law) was the abortion trials of Dr. Henry Morgantaler. No Canadian jury would convict him in spite of the fact that he was clearly violating the law. The government of the day gave up and changed the law to permit abortion.
So, yes Canadian juries haven't brought in some of the crazy decisions we see south of the border but that doesn't mean that they slavishly follow the law and ignore morality.
Pretty much everything in your post is 100% wrong, but this one takes the cake:
A cheque is considered credit.
No, a post-dated cheque is considered credit. A current-dated cheque is not.
RTA. This took place in Canada, not the USA. Your USA home purchase may have required title insurance, that tells you nothing about the Canadian buying process. From my readings of the thread, Canadian law sides with the buyer, so it's entirely possible that title insurance is considered a luxury option.
let's just bury them alive with a live camera feed, next to a nest of fireants, enough oxygen and a gun full of blanks with the clip welded shut.
The man is 89 years old. He could be long dead and burried by the time it goes to court. There's hardly an incentive here for the lawyer to settle.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
OK, in this story the kid does not sell the house, but it's still quite funny. It was related to me first hand by the now grown-up kid who did it, and he was wild so I have no reason to disbelieve him. It seems that the kid's family was being pestered by an aggressive real estate agent who wanted to help them sell the housse. They had been living there for years, and had no desire to move. The agent wouldn't stop calling. Well, the kid was able to pull off a reasonable impression of his father, and finally relented on his behalf. The agent came by at the appointed hour to fill out the paperwork, so she could represent them. Of course the father knew nothing of this; but knew his son well enough to walk into his room later and say something along the lines of "stop doing that", although probably in less polite terms.
There were, however, no further telemarketing calls from the agent after that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Consider what happens when a doctor screws up:
Current money flow: patient to doctor to insurance to lawyer+patient
Proper money flow: patient to insurance to patient
That is, the patient should be buying insurance to cover any errors made by the doctor. Doctors should not be liable. This way, the doctor bills are much lower and the patients can choose what quality of insurance to buy. (with "none" being a legit choice) The doctor doen't need to mess with insurance, and lawyers are less needed.
That'll never happen because we elect lawyers. Doh!
If a doctor does something which is not a legit accident, I still don't want him liable. I generally want him in jail. Mere stupidity means losing the license to practice, along with some sort of review of the school he attended.
Liability turns hospitals into casinos. With the right injury, you get the jackpot. People who want to play that game should be buying their own insurance so that the doctors don't have to be involved.
...purchasers get something called "title insurance". This is a policy that you pay for all at once, that insures you hold legal title to the property. It's one of the many fees you pay at closing. From a certain point of view, title insurance is a rip-off perpetrated by the legal-industrial complex that runs the system here. I mean, think about it. The government is supposed to record all these transactions, and record them properly. If they screw up, they ought to be the ones who are liable. However, from another PoV it makes sense. What if the hall of recores burns down? Modern tech, with distributed backups and the like, are supposed to prevent that from being a problem; but what if the local recorder of deeds was an idiot and didn't backup the files, or they forgot to pay the offsite backup company before the fire, or there were two simultaneous fires, or... all the things that insurance is supposed to cover. Then, you have to prove you hold legal title, and it ain't so easy.
I have never known anyone who collected on title insurance; but lenders require it. No insurable title, no loan.
You have to wonder though, how often these title insurance companies stay in business for more than 30 years. How long do these policies run? probably just for the life of the loan. I'd go dig into the "envelope of fear and loathing" I got at closing, but even on a rainy Saturday afternoon there are much better things to do, and I think I have a better chance of becoming president than ever being involved in a title dispute.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How do you get a separate policy?
For those interested in this tricky situation, I'd recommend the book and movie 'House of Sand and Fog.' Jennifer Connely plays a woman who wrongly has her home taken for back taxes. It gets put on the auction block and purchased by an Iranian family (headed by Ben Kingsley. Both sides had a valid claim to the house. Tragedy ensues.
The biggest problem is that the average amount of damage per theif is over $90,000 while the average sentence for the person commiting the theft is less than 2 years. For someone that would likely be otherwise flipping burgers $45k a year is pretty good money and not only that room and board is payed for. Most victims I have known have recovered nothing from the theives themselves, goods are distributed around and are hard to trace directly to the theft. Its not like most of them have jobs either so restitution isnt going to happen. No wonder its on the rise...it pays. Want to really stop identity theft, make each offense require a minimum of 5 years. Personally i'd prefer they just shoot them but at the anti-death penalty folks wont go for that.
Since the title hasn't fraudulently passed yet, it is not covered.
However, say the rightful owner in this case was on a year-long cruise and hadn't noticed his house had been stolen.
The new owners sell the house after 6 months.
THEIR title insurance would cover them since the last transaction was bad.
Odd, but I think that is the way it would work.
IANAL, nor IANATIE (am I not a title insurance expert).
As for why they don't do it [the paperwork] themselves? I dunno. I suppose they could do it, but that is like self-insuring. If they can get YOU to pay for insurance on THEIR loan, why wouldn't they!
Many countries sign all kinds of treaties and later have no qualms about voting exceptions and creative reinterpretations of all sorts. For instance, there used to be soldiers and civilians. Now, there's also "ennemy combatants" - whatever that means. There, USA created an exception to circumvent international laws of warfare.
Besides, several treaties allow this sort of creative reinterpretation or selective enforcement explicitely, stating in the preamble that any signing member may derogate in whole or in part.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
The courts should just tell them that somebody confessed to murder in their name, and now they're going to have to go to jail for the next 25 years.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It should be like stealing cars, you cannot benefit from stolen property, therefore
even banks should get their stuff 'reposessed' including every charge/fee/interest rate charge, and handed
back to the owner.
Why is it so hard to keep track of all records?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Dude, USA is owned by China now dont you know? Well at least most of it, MidEast and Japan own a slice too. But they
are buying a large chunk yearly.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Small pages, small details, hard to read, winning words have very generic discription (painting, photo, schema, screenshot), sometimes cannot pass.
I am almost convinced that partners are not robots.
1000 points later I am done.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
He has an estate (at least one child, and a niece) who could continue the suit after his death.
This is in Canada, don't most Commonwealth countries allow for private prosecutions? He could tell the lawyer if he doesn't settle for the full worth of the house, he will prosecute him for fraud and get him sent to jail.
1: Fraudlently registered title is invalid and reverts to he previous owner.
2: Mortgage on property affected by title fraud (or loan acquired through title fraud either directly or indirectly) is not enforcable.
Onus is on the buyer and lender is to protect themselves with diligence and title insurance. Current owner has no onus under the law to protect himself from this sort of fraud -- that's what the law is for.
Minimum sentence of 10 years, no parole for real-estate fraud. Prohibited for a further 10 years from owning any real estate, or being involved in real estate transactions of any kind. (Other than renting 1 apartment as their principal residence.)
Ian Ameline
In the widely reported Canadian case, the critical issue was, that a lawyer verified the false identity.
It was not a matter of stealing the identity using some fancy, high-tech method, it was simply the matter of a lawyer not doing his job properly. I think suing the lawyer as doctors are sued for malpractice could be a good start in stopping this practice, which seems to have been introduced by people from the former USSR. Co-incidently a documentary was broadcast in Canada around the same time, exploring how factories, houses even an entire vilage close to Moscow was "stolen" in a very similar manner by Russian criminals. Canada and other countries are sometimes caught by surprize by imported criminal plots, which exploit the sometimes naive Westerners.
Do you even know what "writing off" is? I do not think it means what you think it means.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
This isn't new really. Before the laws in Wisconsin were changed, it took 2 people to claim someone has become mentally incompetent and so gain power of attorney (and start selling assets or whatever). Any 2 people. This happened to my great-granmother.. two scamsters had declared her incompetent so some dudes showed up at her house to take her to the old folks home. Luckily she got in touch with some relatives and put this to a stop before her house etc. got sold, but this apparently just happened every so often back in the '50s or so. She made a big stink about it to the governor etc., and now it's got to be relatives that sign you off the the home.
So, in Canada, a tout can actually sell you the Niagara Falls??!
Any Ontario lawyer worthy of maintaining his/her practice will inform the purchaser of title insurance (and recommend it), and several options are available (including insurance purchased through the Law Society of Upper Canada). Also, lawyers in Ontario are now required to ask for two pieces of photo id, whether or not you know the lawyer. Yes, identification can be falsified, but it is more effort on the part of the would-be scammers, and the lawyer is at least performing due diligence in asking for the id.
Yours is funnier.
The U.S. system is very similar to the Canadian central banking system when it comes to monetary policy, but the regulatory structure is different.
While many banks are regulated through the Dept. of the Treasury, they do not borrow money from it. Instead, money is "made" by the Federal Reserve, which is controlled by a governement-appointed, but not controlled, board of governors (similar to the Supreme Court). Banks that are members of the Federal Reserve "borrow" money from it at the rate set by the board. This also controls the rates at which banks lend to each other. The Fed also sets the reserve requirments for banks, which controls how many times any given "made" dollar can be "churned" through the banking system.
If the government wants to borrow money, it does so through the sale of Treasury bills. The Federal Reserve is not involved in that process.
The reason you cannot find any truly "Nationwide" banks has to do with the Federal system of government used in the U.S. Constitution. Basically, to open a branch in a state, a bank must comply with both Federal and State law for that state. This creates something of a burden for a bank looking to expand operations.
Interactions between banks, (like loans and check cashing) are also generally run by the Federal Reserve.
SirWired
That hurts.
One of the very first news media reports I read about identity theft was in the largely pre-internet late 90s, and what made it so scary was not that the victims in the story had credit cards opened in their names or even their checking accounts looted, but that the thieves were very close to being able to liquidate the retirement funds (nearly $500k!) of the victims. The only reason the fraud was caught was some random transaction related to a change on their retirement funds didn't reflect their "new" (aka the thieves) address due to some glitch in a computer system that was *supposed* to have used the "new" address for the mailing.
I'm pretty sure that the article mentioned that in other cases titles to properties had been frauduently transferred, enabling thieves to conduct sham sales and collect proceeds from the "new" mortgages associated with the sales.
Some other posters in this thread have mentioned that the properties stolen are rentals, implying that you couldn't get away with a fraudulent title transfer or sale without actually occupying the property. Having refinanced my house 3 times in a single year (two were remodeling related), the property may get visited by an appraisor but I can't think of anyone showing up at the property and saying, "Hey, who lives here?" or the county sending anything in the mail that says "new transactions related to this property" to the current listed owner.
When I think of how do I prove I own the place, it seems so obvious, but what bit of paper in a mountain of mostly worthless paper actually *PROVES* it? Or is it a "preponderance of evidence" think where I show a history of making mortgage payments, my crap all over the house, etc?
There is some quick and dirty misreporting on this issue.
First - there is a difference between "Registry" and "Land Titles". Land Titles is a Torrens based system where your title is guaranteed. The problems described in these articles largely arise under the Land Titles registration system, not Registry.
Secondly, when you have a bona fide purchaser for value without notice, you have someone who is equity's darling. They are NOT the party who ought to "suffer."
Thirdly, these articles also misreport the consequences of being the victim of land fraud. The man who lost a rental property will get full compensation from the Land Titles fund. This is not a case where the victim or the purchaser *should* be out any appreciable money. What is really going on is an attachment of an 89 year old man to the rental property itself. He doesn't want the money - he wants the property back. And that's not going to happen; moreover, in my submission - it should NOT happen in the circumstances of this case.
Fourthly, this is the third such big case to hit our courts over the past year. The one prior to this involved a woman who lost the house she resided in. Morris Cooper, the lawyer for the original home owner, lost at first instance based on a recent decision of the Court of Appeal for Ontario. Cooper's case is off to the Court of Appeal and the Court will be invited to re-examine its decision in light of the new facts in this most recent wave of land fraud.
Fifthly - this is really nothing new, in the sense that American jurisdictions have experienced a wave of fraud over the years, especially though the use of Quit Claim deeds in Florida and other jurisdictions. It is relatively new to Canada. Frankly, I think title insurance has made the problem worse - not better.
Sixthly, the "Slashdot solution" of imprisoning everybody for a bazillion years is not going to happen. We don't do that in Canada. The North York lawyer whose notarized a power of attorney will, I expect, be investigated by the Law Society of Upper Canada and the LSUC will take disciplinary action - if required - based on the evidence that their investigation reveals. I don't know the details and after only reading a newspaper article which probably does not appreciate the real details and nuances of what happened and what didn't - you don't know the real "facts" either. I'm prepared to withhold judgment of a colleague's practice until I know what happened - and what didn't.
Seventh, and perhaps most importantly, the suggestion of putting extraordinary obligations on the mortgagee sounds deceptively appealing. That's only because you have not thought it through. It only wise to a point. Mortgagees do their titles searches - that's why we *have* a land registry/ land titles system in the first place. If you put an in-depth investigatory onus upon the lender (which is what a Torrens Land Titles system is designed to avoid in the first place), what we will all have is *significantly higher* mortgage fee on every transaction, a significant increase in the time it takes to secure mortgage financing and a *significant* slowdown in the housing market which will ripple like a shockwave across our economy and trigger a recession. That's simply not just an unwise idea - it's a plainly *STUPID* idea.
What we are *REALLY* talking about here is how to deal with a problem - a *risk* - that you can never remove entirely from any land system. All you can so is manage the risk and spread the cost of that risk out across a lot of people so that the cost of that burden is at least manageable and transaction costs are minimized for all. We DO have a compensation fund. What we don't have is a magic wand so that a home owner and a home purchaser both get the same property when they are victims of a third party rogue. The money we can deal with - the question of possession and specific performance we cannot. >>Someone has to lose that right to possess the property.
The common law has treated the bona fide purchaser
.Robert
I've heard of people registering phoney deeds in my state. I dont know how common it is. Plus I dont know how much a of a fake paper trail you need to appear as a sale.
The bank or CMHC hires an independant appraiser, not you. Appraisers are licensed and governed under strict rules for this very reason. I had no choice in the appraisal, but I had confidence that it would value for the price I paid, which it did.
Ahhh, yeah...I wasn't trying to imply that what I wrote is how the current law stands, that is why I used quotes. Yes you legally own your morgaged house but it is similar to a frozen asset since you cannot sell it without clearing the morgage.
What I was trying to get across is that in normal circumstances the buyer and seller arrange and complete the transaction using their own lawyer and a bank. People like me try and read all the crap and understand it but in the end we are forced to trust that OUR bank/lawyer knows what they are doing. We should also expect this trust to be honoured in law, say by forcing the "proffesional" to take out insurance.
"Title insurance"
Means that I am covered for someone else's screw-ups, it also means that I first need to be aware I am responsible for someone else's screw-ups.
"how is the bank supposed to know the difference, anyway?"
If a bank/lawyer can't identify someone, then what hope has the customer got? Often the buyer and seller don't even meet each other until after settlement, if at all!
Instead of laws protecting the consumer against fuckwits and frauds in the financial paper mill, what we have are laws that protect, (ordered by priority), the mill, the fuckwits and the frauds/customers (ya caught me but I'm bankrupt). Sure, "the customer" has to pay for both the shit and the sugar otherwise the mill will collapse. However, shifting blame to an individual customer in a particular fuck-up/fraud and punishing them with a crippling debt or bankruptcy, may be legal, but it is certainly not reasonable.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.