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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: 3, Informative) by Osamabobama on Friday December 13 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
Usually, there's a notary involved with such things. For them, it is routine to check id and get a thumb print (in some jurisdictions) to ensure the person signing is who they claim to be.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @09:45PM
In many jurisdictions in the U.S., the attorney (or their assistant) is the notary public. This is not considered a conflict of interest, which flabbergasts me, especially because I am an attorney. The whole point of a notary public is to be an impartial witness to the act. However, a lawyer and their staff are ethically required to carry out the interests of their client within the bounds of the law. As a lawyer, if your client has an interest in that document signed and the results thereof, you and your staff have an interest in that document and the results thereof. In addition, a lawyer has a duty to prevent certain fallout from their actions. Both of those, by definition, means that you are not impartial.
In addition, you put your staff in a bad position. If a lawyer tells their paralegal to notarize a document for clients and they refuse to because the clients fail the identity check, then it makes her, potentially, look bad to the employer for not carrying out their orders. It also makes the lawyer look bad for having staff refuse to do what they tell them. You are also putting them in the bad spot because the staff may have assumed a level of identity verification you did not do, which now puts both of your necks on the line. This means that your staff is in a worse position than the lawyer because they have those problems in addition to the general ones as a legal professional.
That is why I always use a truly independent notary for my clients, as I believe it is the only truly ethical thing to do for both them and myself.