Are You Vulnerable to a Scam?

There have always been grifters and scam artists in the world who would love to relieve you of some of your cash.  They get away with it every day, sometimes on a large scale, especially in real estate.  Savvy brokers are careful to warn buyers and sellers of scammers that try to highjack real estate transactions by intercepting emails between brokers and closers or lenders.  They then pose as one of these players with emails that closely resemble the legitimate players email and make urgent requests for the principles (usually the buyer) to deposit their funds into a certain bank account.  Successfully duped consumers find out too late that their funds have been stolen and the perpetrators usually walk away without consequences.

These greedy con artists have found another creative and devious method for stealing money from unwary consumers.  In a recent case, a broker was contacted by a person who claimed to own a large parcel of vacant land they wanted to sell.  The broker spent time preparing the property for marketing, including performing a market analysis, etc.  But during that time frame, the broker became suspicious about this person’s real identity so they did some research and even asked for identification.   The scammer quickly provided a copy of a fake driver license.

While the broker was waiting for ID verification, they were busy doing other research, including writing a letter to the real owner, who quickly contacted them and verified that they didn’t want to sell and the other person was indeed a scammer.  The broker had already figured it out, because the deed showed the property had been transferred to the real owner upon the death of their father on a date prior to the birth date that showed on the fake ID.

In this case the scam was discovered quickly (even though the bad guys were never caught), but if they had been successful in this fraudulent transfer of property, they would have taken a large sum of money from the sale of property they didn’t even own.  This type of scam is surfacing frequently now, especially in rural property sales on raw land. 

Brokers and closers are hyper vigilant for this type of scam and have lots of practice and methods for vetting sellers.  If you are a seller of property, please don’t be offended when brokers take time to check your identity!  If you are a buyer, you should take care to use an experienced broker and not be enticed by something that seems too good to be true!