Slashdot Mirror
Criminals Steal House Thanks To Hacked Email
mask.of.sanity writes with this quote from ZDNet:
"An international cybercrime investigation is underway into a sophisticated scam network that used email and fax to sell an Australian man's AU$500,000 property without his knowledge. The man was overseas when the Nigerian-based scammers stole his credentials and amazingly sold two houses through his real estate agent. He rushed home and prevented the sale of his second home from being finalized. Australian Federal Police and overseas law enforcement agencies will investigate the complex scam, which is considered the first of its kind in Australia. It is alleged scammers had stolen the man's email account and personal property documents to sell the houses and funnel cash into Chinese bank accounts. Investigating agencies admit the scammers hoodwinked both the selling agents and the government, and said they had enough information to satisfy regulatory requirements. The police did not rule out if the scammers had links to the man."
Why is it on Slashdot? People have been fraudulently selling other people's property for a very long time, and this is hardly the first or biggest such Internet-related crime.
Don't leave him home without a restraining order against yours.
The fact that property of this value can be transferred without the owner's knowledge and he has to go to the australian government in the hopes of recovering full value for the home is shameful. You would think that a court of law would need to be consulted and signatures would have to be issued and compared, at least through the mail.
Does the man lose his home? He never sold the property and I don't see why he should be giving it up.
These kind of articles never include a followup on what hapenned.
I doubt the real estate agent will be refunding their commission.
http://xkcd.com/792/
You can add house to that list.
Here in the US criminals stole not the House, but the whole Executive Branch thanks to hacked voting machines! (allegedly)
...chain myself to my water piping and keep the gun cocked. I'm not leaving MY house. It wasn't for sale so you couldn't have bought it not matter what some f'n pieces of paper say. You burn the f'n papers or I burn the f'n house.
This does, although I am still not sure how the scammers got hold of the original certificate of title. Here in WA this is still a piece of paper and the settlement agent must have it to complete the transaction.
It can be replaced although it is extremely difficult to do so (trust me, I lost one).
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
Everyone knows that Nigerian scammers can't spell and use English grammar correctly
That should have been the first clue
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
It's the only way to be sure.
get it? its a play on words.
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
Horsehockey, This sort of thing has happened many times before in this country. The problem happens because once it hits the registry the registry cannot legally be altered. So if the buyer acted in good faith it is up to the (accidental) seller to recover the funds from the crook. It doesn't happen often because most people are aware of it.
I mean Carmen Sandiego and her gang have been known to steal whole monuments, I'm sure a house is a pretty easy job for them.
Monstar L
If you buy a DVD player from the back of a pub and it turns out to be stolen, then you have to give it back and would be lucky not to be charged with being in reciept of stolen goods.
If you buy a DVD player from the back of a pub, you have to give back your remaining brain cell, because it turns out that your brain is faulty. You can buy a damn DVD player from K-Mart for $35 (Aussie Dollars). I'm sure there's even cheaper out there.
I do understand the point you're making but your example's a bit dated.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
and have issued email warnings to all licensees in the state...
Didn't they learn anything? So they still fell back to e-mail as the official line of communication? With people like that running regulatory agencies, it's no wonder our world is so screwed up.
Are you seeking tranquility with blue serenity, craving luxury with purple indulgence, creating desire with red lust or wanting to make everyone green with envy?–welcome to ghdokbuy.com to choose your own destiny.
Here in the UK for as long as it's been, you used to get the deeds to a house when you bought it / paid off the mortgage. It is basically a printed piece of paper which tells you the details of the house, like boundary rights or restrictions, and who is the owner of the house. When under a mortgage, you can see that the mortgage company's details are used as the owner. This document gets updated whenever the property is sold or a mortgage is obtained against it.
Now a few years ago, these documents which you HAD as the ultimate proof you own your home became a museum piece, and now the only proof that you own the property is an electronic record in the Land Registry.
Unfortunately these electronic records have already been tampered with, and people have lost their homes because the government decided to trust a computer, rather than have the backup of who has the deeds to the property.
There was an article in the BBC TV news about the scam, and just how easy it is. This is what you get when you have easily bought politicians who think the answer to everything is a bloody computer system.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Here in the US, it's normal for a home buyer to buy title insurance (and for mortgage companies to require it if they're lending money) which insures that the buyer doesn't lose (much) money if the title is bad. There are all sorts of reasons this can happen - deliberate forgery isn't the only one, though it's not unpopular, as are "selling the same house to multiple buyers", etc.
The Wikipedia article on Torrens Title looks like the state provides the title insurance in case they've allowed fraudulent transactions to occur.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How have there been over 100 comments and not a single one pointing that out?
The guy was on TV here in Australia. He claimed the authorization signature looked nothing like his , and he said it looked like a 5 year old child wrote it ....
The owner can't protect himself against fraudulent sales because he doesn't know a transaction is taking place. The buyer, on the other hand, knows that a transaction is taking place and that there is a certain risk that it's fraudulent. The buyer has all the power and information necessary to make sure it's not a fraudulent transaction and to insure against it. That's why the buyer should lose the house and it should go back to its original owner. The buyer should have title insurance (either privately purchased or through the state).
If you don't place the responsibility on the buyer, no party who knows about the transaction has any interest in preventing fraud: the real estate agent gets his cut, the buyer gets a cheap house, and the con men get their money. In that situation, they can all ignore signs of fraud to the maximum degree that they can plausibly get away with.
"The thieves, believed to be Nigerian" and Soulskill's "The man was overseas when the Nigerian-based scammers stole his credentials"....lost in copying?
Australia doesn't require someone to show up and sign a bunch of crap, I guess. It seems I signed about 5,000 documents both times I purchased a house.
FAQs are evil.
When you see porn in Australia!
Some insight from a UK perspective anyway. I work for a fairly large firm of solicitors in the UK who specialize in property/real estate. Here's a few worrying bits of information:
We are required to have ID on the file by law, we are not required to check it in any way whatsoever.
If the vendor/purchaser is long distance from our offices we will accept emailed/faxed copies of all paperwork (INCLUDING ID) within certain easily restrictions such as certified copies, see next point.
We will create a certified copy of ID from anyone that walks in from the street which is basically a legal way of saying we've had sight of the original. If someone was worried about sending their passport to us by post they could get a copy and take it to a local firm of solicitors/lawyers/attorneys and have them stamp it, we would then accept that by fax or email as if it were the original document. This process is usually done by whoever the office assistant/intern happens to be and they will certainly not know how to check the document to make sure it is an original. In my experience they tend to be more worried about whether or not they will be able to make the photocopier work.
We are never required to speak to our client by phone or in person, some simply prefer to do business by email for whatever reason. (sometimes language/accent barriers - communicating via google translate is an experience for sure)
We are not required to check signatures beyond a casual glance to make sure they look similar to the one shown on the ID and this is usually not done. If the document is signed that's good enough for most of the solicitors I've worked for.
Posting ac for obvious reasons.
.. in Australia? That is essentially what happened. They stole his house and sold it. What if it were a car or a computer? If thieves can steal things and "sell" them to someone else who gets to keep it, something is very seriously wrong with the legal system, there.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I don't know about Australia, but in the USA, there is this concept of title insurance. A "sale" like that in the story is invalid because the title was stolen by fraudulent means. So the title is effectively no good. The title insurance (which is there to protecy the buyer with respect to defects in title) needs to pay out to the buyer for their loss and the owner keeps his home. There are already existing cases in the USA where home sales were voided due to improper or fraudulent title. In one of them, the "sale" was reversed 8 years after it was finalized, all because the seller's title was fraudulently obtained. And this was 30+ years ago, before email. The fact that email was involved should make it easier to void the sale.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Real estate agents in Australia are a cowboys compared to the agents I dealt with in the US and yes, I have experience with both.
From the Ottawa Sun
http://www.ottawasun.com/news/world/2010/09/11/15317471.html/
Hey I know the Chicoms are involved with building African infrastructures but this is going too far.
Seriously, are there significance with this? Are the Chinese banks easy to deal with or something?
I sort of think he should have kept a better eye on his properties, but that's neither here nor there.
Fundamentally, I think this is why we need some form of authentication that "only you know," but everyone can verify/authenticate against. Most places -foolishly- usually social security numbers here in the 'states. I think that's a terrible idea as the protections surrounding them are incredibly weak. I was going to suggest this fellow have some sort of PGP/GPG setup, but if the criminals got into his email, they'd probably have his passphrase(s) and key(s), too.
Sigh...
Lennie Briscoe was working on this care in 2003:
http://www.nbc.com/Law_and_Order/episode_guide/305.shtml
Elderly man owns his Harlem brownstone free and clear. Some scammer steals his identity on line, takes out a second mortgage on the house, hides the money, loan goes into default, bank forecloses, real owner is out on the street.
Then he finds scammer and kills him. Which is kind of interesting, since the victim is 79 years old in the story.
So, if they're doing it on prime time TV in 2003, it's not a story today. No matter where it happened.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
After all of this time we have finally found her!!! She's in Nigeria!
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
Can someone really sell a property in AU without the owner's signature? Hmmm.
A more likely scenario includes the real estate agent as scam leader, and looking forward to the commissions.
Except hoops and checkpoints is a bit of an exaggeration. And it shouldn't be harder (or easier) if you are from Nigeria. It isn't that onerous and it isn't that bad.
No, she stole the Nigerian's identity as well.