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."

Comments

Fight fire with fire

[mdhoover]

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.

The other shoe hasn't dropped yet

[Anonymous Coward]

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 Notary Public should get nailed...

[Newer Guy]

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.

I am not a lawyer...

[Chineseyes]

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.