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from the easier-than-physically-stealing-it dept.
Submitted via IRC for chromas
Junk mail helps woman discover her home had been stolen
Rohina Husseini had no idea someone could steal a house, but the first small clue that the home she owned for nearly a decade was no longer hers was a piece of junk mail that most of us ignore.
The Springfield mother said she initially tossed the mortgage refinancing offers that began arriving over the summer in the trash, but one detail bugged her: The letters were addressed to another woman. Curious, Husseini said she finally opened one.
"You bought a new house, congratulations," read the letter addressed to Masooda Persia Hashimi.
"I was like, 'Wow, this doesn't seem right,' " Husseini said. "I don't know this person at all. She never lived in my house even before (I moved in)."
In the frantic hours that followed, Husseini discovered the total stranger was now the legal owner of the brick Colonial worth about $525,000 that forms the center of her life with her husband and daughter.
Husseini, who owns a home health-care business, was the victim of a lesser-known crime alternately called house stealing or deed theft that has seen an uptick in some areas in recent years. Scammers gain control of a deed to a home and then attempt to resell the property or to open a line of credit on it.
The results can be disastrous. Unsuspecting homeowners can be foreclosed upon or even find strangers living in an unoccupied property or vacation home that has been sold out from under them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pvanhoof on Friday December 13 2019, @10:53AM (3 children)
Exactly. This is afaik simply impossible here in Belgium. You need two notaries, one for the seller and one for the buyer, to both verify everything before any sale of any house can take place. And the notaries are legally responsible for whatever legal fuckup happens. Which means the notary would pay for all costs to undo the crap he or she caused.
I think it's insane that any legal system can possibly allow this nonsense.
But then again. There are many things insane about the US's legal system, I guess. Glad that I don't live there. Crazy country. Land of the brave and opportunities my ass.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @12:37PM (1 child)
This is nothing. The courts overturned the sale and the perpetrator is going to jail, as they should. There was a rash of this type of scam up here in Canada some years ago and the Supreme Court of Ontario upheld the sales because the bank that financed them would have lost money.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @06:45PM
Must have been many decades ago because the Supreme Court of Ontario ceased to exist in 1990, when it was superseded by the Ontario Court of Justice (General Division) -- subsequently renamed to the Ontario Superiour Court of Justice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @10:24PM
Oh, please. It simply makes the theft harder to carry out, not impossible. One must then impersonate the actual owner of the house.
There's no such thing as a "perfect" legal system which can account for any and all attempts to derail or attempt a fraud on it. Because there's no such thing as a perfect system.