In Canada, Complex Fraud Schemes Are Targeting Homeowners

CANADA: Early this year, Toronto police announced they needed the public’s assistance in apprehending two people involved in a complex fraud scheme.

According to police, the individuals used forged identities to pose as city homeowners. They then sold the house and handed the keys to the unwitting new owners.

Meanwhile, the true house owners had been out of the country on business since January 2022.

After noticing their mortgage payments had vanished from their bank accounts, the out-of-town couple discovered their home had been sold without their knowledge.

The incident piqued the interest of many Canadians, particularly in the Greater Toronto Area and Vancouver, where real estate is considered a national obsession due to its high cost – the average home costs more than C$1m ($749,000; £620,000) – and scarcity of housing.

Similar stories from other Toronto property owners have since emerged, and investigators say these previously uncommon cases of property title fraud appear to be on the rise.

Housing Prices Have Increased In Canada

These types of cases are “definitely unique to this point in time,” according to Trevor Koot, CEO of the British Columbia Real Estate Association and a nearly 20-year industry veteran.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, referring to the level of sophistication used to carry out these crimes.

What exactly is title fraud? How much has it increased in Canada?
Mortgage and title fraud are two common schemes involving home or property ownership.

According to Brian King of King Advisory International Group, a Toronto-based firm investigating white-collar crime, mortgage fraud is more common.

It is committed when a fraudster uses forged identification documents to obtain a second mortgage on a home they do not own, usually after the first mortgage has been paid off in full or nearly so.

Title fraud, on the other hand, involves tenants posing as the owner of a vacant home in Canada and selling it to serious buyers. This results in the property’s total title transfer.

If the home has title insurance, the real owner and buyer can usually get most of their money back. The insurance covers legal fees incurred during the process and aids in re-establishing ownership.

Mr. King stated that he had seen increased mortgage and title fraud frequency since 2020.

He said his firm had seen a “rash” of title fraud in recent years. In almost all cases, the homeowners lived elsewhere when fraudsters took over their property, in places such as the United States and China and Canada.

Title Fraud Is Rampant In Vancouver And Toronto

One of his clients, Mr. King said, was a couple who moved for work to the UK from Toronto canada in 2018. Their Canadian home was then sold from beneath them in 2022.

It was sold for C$1.7 million and had been completely renovated when they discovered it had been stolen last June. As of February, the couple was still canada working on getting their home’s title restored.

Between the 1960s and 2019, Chicago Title Insurance Company’s Canada branch saw only two cases of fraud – mortgage and title – according to John Rider, vice president.

They are currently dealing with dozens of cases, including at least five cases of title fraud, all in the Greater Toronto Area, which includes the city and surrounding municipalities.

Similar cases of title fraud have emerged in the province of British Columbia, which is home to Vancouver, where the average home costs C$1.1 million, albeit less frequently.

The BC Land Title and Survey Authority (LTSA) reported two attempts at title fraud since 2020, only one successful. The public corporation added that it is only aware of one previous case in 2019 and two in 2008 and 2009.

It maintains that these fraud cases are extremely rare, even though the LTSA processes up to one million land title applications annually.

The Same Things Are Happening All Over The World

A similar case made headlines in the UK in 2021 when a man in Luton returned home to discover that the house and its contents had been sold without his knowledge.

On the other hand, property fraud cases in the UK appear to be on the rise. The UK Land Registry data provided to the BBC show an average of 41 reported mortgage and title fraud cases over the last four years. Cases peaked at 50 in 2016-2017.

Why are there more reports of title fraud?
Experts are baffled as to why there has been such an increase in reported cases, particularly in Toronto.

Mr. King believes that virtual real estate transactions during the pandemic may have made it more difficult to detect fake identification documents. He also mentioned that the pandemic in canada had forced some people to stay away from their homes for longer due to travel restrictions.

Others have noted the increasing sophistication of the perpetrators, some of whom have been linked to organized crime and appear to understand the Canadian real estate system well.

According to Mr. Rider, the fraudulent IDs used in these transactions frequently appear authentic, and perpetrators will hire skilled actors to pose as homeowners and carry out the scheme.

“IDs are so easily faked now that they can’t be relied on to close a C$3 million transaction,” Mr. Rider said.

There is also the financial aspect of these crimes. Real estate in Toronto has appreciated significantly over the last few decades, with the average home costing C$198,150 in 1996. It was C$1.18m last year.

“It makes sense that there is a lot of emphases on where real estate is really valuable,” said Ron Usher, general counsel for the Society of Notaries Public in British Columbia canada.

There is no escaping the fact that we live in a time when everything changes.

“These are not easy crimes to commit and are frequently caught and stopped.”

He and others have called for a national investigation to determine the underlying causes and whether more can be done to protect Canadian homeowners.

SOURCE – (BBC)