My dad had a relative that owned a vacant piece of land in Florida in the 60’s or 70’s. When he went back down after a couple of years to check on it he found an entire plaza built on it. So he was the proud owner of a shopping plaza after it went through the courts.
Except that after 7 years of land being unclaimed and someone builds on it, the owner releases ownership Edit- it's called Adverse possession and my comment is referring to the comment I replied to and not the video*
50 years ago, my wife and I bought a building lot. We had a title search and title insurance. We build a house and moved in. Two years later I received a letter from a lawyer saying his client owned my lot. He demanded $1000 a month rent. I turned the matter over to the title insurance company. The supposed owner had purchased the lot from someone who didn’t own it. Never heard from him again.
Most people don't even know that's why you pay for title insurance. They research ownership before you close escrow, and it's on them if it's a mistake
@@chrischeehan2423 That article Steve quoted from claimed that title insurance doesn't cover you if fraud is involved. Doesn't make sense because, isn't that the whole purpose of title insurance - that you get a valid title.
I had a similar in Oregon. I bought 20 acres planning to build once I retired but it was vacant for 10 years. When I went back here is a house ON MY LAND still under construction . It did work out. 1.5 ft of the house encroached on LOCAL TRIBAL LAND. I contacted the tribe council and elders. I signed an easement for them to drive to town across my land. That changed their drive to town from 17 miles to 2 miles. An elder called me and said "Taken care of. Come home" They knocked the entire house down to the foundation. My new house is nearly done now and the tribe paved the easement road. I finished the road from my land to the easement. Everyone won
How difficult would it have been for the lawyer representing the fraudulent seller to check tax records to determine the address where tax bills were sent? It would have been obvious that the South African wasn’t the true owner.
I think the first thing they should check is whether the lawyer who claimed to have Power Of Attorney is involved with the LLC, and find out if the money that was paid for the property went anywhere other than his bank account.
@@gretchenk.2516no one said you had to be an attorney to have a power of attorney. But in your effort to correct someone you missed out on the fact it was an attorney that had it.
this actually happened to the family member of a friend... in fact even worse.. they levelled the ranch house that was his grandmother's.. in its original MCM condition.. .. he got a phone call from an angry relative.. "why are you tearing grandma's house down...".. 'Huh? I was just there last week and turned the heat on for the winter".. by the time he got over there the house was partially pushed off the foundation.. after a year worth of lawsuits.. a select group of individuals had to **PAY** to have the ORIGINAL house rebuilt to the spec it was in... Lots of handmade cabinets, carefully saving aertifacts that were saveable like the sinksand toilets that hadnt broken.. down to wrought iron railings.. it cost them a ton of money.. and when the LLC threatened to fail he just offered to sue the individuals and pursue criminal charges for fraud.. that shut em up quick...
It's odd that threatening to sue them as individuals worked. The whole point of an LLC is to shield the individuals. In fact, it's odd that the LLC didn't just immediately declare bankruptcy and walk away.
@@commontater1785 if there is an attempt to defraud arent the individuals liable beyond their LLC? and by defraud it comes down to how the damages were going to be paid out.. obviously an LLC should protect individuals in a business mistake.. it can be argued that getting o nthe wrong property as damaging as it is.. is simply a mistake or can be.. however if attempts to defraud were made in trying to buiold back a cheap tract home.. or in this case they REALLY just wanted to buy the property for a premium.. so lets say he could prove a conspiracy to flatten the wrong house instead of the proper one next door in hopes the owner sells so they have a plot of adjacent parcels that look a whole lot better to redevelopers than parcels with one decent sized one missing.. I believe thats where he was trying to go with it .. I think it put the fear in that of they lost the civil suit then local prosecuters might be looking at a legal charge that comes with real Jail.. so instead they rebuild the house and all walk away..
@@commontater1785 Not odd if it can be proven that the bankruptcy was intended to shield the owners of the LLC from fraud charges. That would be Racketeering. It is in Las Vegas.
@@ramoncotta1264 Right, but in this case, it wasn't the LLC that committed the fraud. They were also victims. I mean, can they be expected to fund the LLC up to a level that anticipates all expenses wasted, no return on investment, plus we have to pay damages?
The law firm which took power of attorney should be sanctioned and face disbarment. They should have done their due diligence and verified the person was who they claimed they were.
" due diligence" Is the magic words no defense lawyer want to hear and the courts love. I worked for a law office for 15 years before starting my own Para-Legal business all the land owners legal team has to do is use those two words, Game Over. The land owner can name his price and terms it will never get to a court room I am sure the LLC will not want to take a roll of those dice
@@davidvincent1093 well, if something like this happens, due diligence was not performed and they're liable at the end of the day. But, we both know how well a diligent lawyer documents everything that they do, accounting for documents, document revisions, time spent on a client's behalf, etc. A diligent lawyer can bury anyone claiming a lack of due diligence in so much documentation as to make their attorney surrender and a jurist laugh. Learned that setting up their time/documentation tracking software and migrating old records over to the new system.
What really blows my mind is that the sale of property presumably involves the city as well. They have no records of who currently owns the property and no contact info? I suppose the power of attorney would immunize the city from liability, but every party involved had to bushwhack through red flags to get here. Hard to imagine at least one of them wasn't knowingly acting criminally and should be held to account.
@@bvoyelr well, it's obviously impossible for a county to perform a title search. That's just crazy talk. Which is the very first thing that is supposed to be done when transferring property, at least if done by a licensed realtor or attorney. So yeah, they bushwhacked through a forest of red flags, leaving the developer stuck with a yard full of rakes to run through.
A friend was just searching on real estate site. Saw a house for sale at an address that a friend in another state used to live at, and let them know. Turned out it was his grandparent lot, left it and a house to him, before he left for top prison jobs in other states. He was married when he got it, and divorced before he left. So he called his local lawyer to investigate. Ex-wife and new contractor husband filed property transfer papers, did not file for construction permits, rebuilt and expanded the house, got a buddy to "inspect" the house, and put up for sale. Currently both are in federal jail no bail. Lake Springfield, IL.
If all contractors on Long Island went to jail for doing shady work there will be no contractors left. I could imagine what else they do. I seen 95% bad work. The house I live in now ground was not prepared right and cracks everywhere.
Thanks for doing a story from my state. I am a few towns away from this. There have been a couple of small updates. The lawyer who held the fraudulent POA will not speak publicly on this and has been named in the suit. The builder is claiming to be a victim and has filed to be removed from the suit. All construction has stopped on the site. Apparently, the South African doppelganger used the wrong date of birth, and some other identifiers didn't match up, so due diligence was not done at all in this case.
Yes, I've been following too having driven that route near Sacred Heart many times. That lawyer has some 'splainin to do as does the original listing agent. The real owner had been easy to contact through a basic google search.
If it was my property I would give them 60 days to demo the house and return the lot to its original state or sell the house and give me the proceeds!..otherwise I would file criminal and civil charges.
Unique property is a thing. I knew someone who had property taken to build a road. The thing is he had a grass runway for his airplane. The state ended up giving him an abandoned airport to replace his land. He was very happy with the outcome.
Grass runway which may or may not be hard to see at night/ in bad weather conditions vs a whole abandoned airport that you can set up to accommodate bad weather/trying to land at night I know what I’d choose 😂
Upkeep of the tarmac would be expensive though! But if its at least in climate that doesn't really experience freezing temperatures during the year, it wouldn't be as bad.
I worked in the mortgage industry as a closing agent for 20 years. I’d conducted nearly 9000 closings in all phases of refinancing and purchases. There was people from time to time that had no ID or a ‘ID’ that was not acceptable. Without proper ID I would not conduct the closing. It happened at least 50 times and I knew in my gut that something shady was going on. Some were furious and I stood my ground. No ID No Deal. I would adjourn the closing after speaking with Title and they backed me up. Oh and the geriatric closings. Folks who didn’t know what they were doing we’re not coherence and family members were there trying to coerce them to sign and I said I can’t do this. There’s no way these people do not know what they’re doing. I will not be a party to conducting a closing with somebody who has dementia, and not all their faculties they don’t know what they’re doing. Again, irate customers, but oh well, my career and everything I ever worked for, is not gonna get taken away, because I did not do my due diligence to verify identification, and who was signing at the table.
". I will not be a party to conducting a closing with somebody who has dementia, and not all their faculties they don’t know what they’re doing." People are absolutely disgusting. I've heard of Ex-Wives going to nursing homes to do stuff like this to their ex-husbands, but to your own family? People are absoluteyl sick.` It makes me so mad to read stuff like this.
Geriatric closings - a Revocable Trust, would avoid this problem, and avoid the time + expense of Probate Court. It also allows to skip a generation of taxes, if setup correctly.
I'm a Notary loan signing agent as well, and I've experienced the exact same things! I've had a few family members meet me at their Dad's nursing home to get him to sign a power of attorney. He was suffering from dementia and he was heavily medicated. They were literally trying to hold the pen in his hand to sign the document for him. I walked out. Not losing my license for anyone. Period. There were many more instances of family members/spouses speaking for the signer and trying to cover up the fact that dementia or straight-up intimidation is afoot. There are Crazy people out there!
@@patriciatyler1193 It's so sad how American is just so selfish to the point where FAmily is nothing. I will say, that even though it's sad to see this for the fathers.... I can imagine how awful of a parent some of these parents were to their children.
My Grandfather sold a corner lot on Ventura Bvld to a builder who was building a high rise building and went broke a new owner told him he would not be paying for the lot .My Dad was a Lawyer and told the new owners to come and meet their new business partner who would take a share of the rents on the high rise. They brought the money within three days after they tried to bluff an old man.
@@who-gives-a-toss_Bear No he had owned a broken down gas station on the corner and it might have needed to have the soil removed due to possible leaking tanks so he just took the money I think it was 60 k back in the 70s I think my Dad wanted to own a piece of the building but did what my Grandfather told him to do.
My neighbor built a deck on my property and he thought i was a complete asshole for telling him to tear it down. I paid for a survey that proved it was on my property. He still didn't believe me. He paid for a survey from a different company and got the same bad news. I even told him I'd split the property down the middle and sell him half. No he wanted my land for free. I had to finally get a lawyer and put a lien on his property. He tore it down.
I showed a neighbor where the stakes were from the last survey and he said it was for the power company. (All the power wires are above ground.) The stakes had the business name on them and a local phone number. They magically disappeared shortly after.
@@billyjoejimbob75 If by "stakes" you mean the permanent survey monument- usually a capped iron pipe (pin), rebar, or (on pavement) a magnetic nail- removing those is a crime pretty much everywhere. However sometimes surveyors put wooden stakes next to the monument to make it more visible - you can rip those out without fear of jail.
@@billyjoejimbob75 I think that is the monument brokenrecords is talking about, I got yelled at when i was a little kid running around town looking for scrap material to use in building the neighborhood kids treehouse in the woods, they said something like what brokenrecords said, its a fine to remove them, and its rude and they are not scrap.
Years ago when I was living in CT a friend went home after work to find that his driveway had been freshly paved. The driveway that was supposed to be paved was next door. He DID thank the pavers for the free paving job. Talk about having your day made.
Then there was the guy who came home one day and found that his lawn was missing! Somebody stole his lawn! Well, the sod company had got the wrong address. The guy agreed when they offered to reseed his lawn and to restore it to better-than-original condition.
Neighbors built a lovely cabin across the creek from me. New neighbors next to me moved in, got survey, found cabin was 100% on their land (which we had guessed.) It was disassembled the next week, and moved up the hill closer to the house it belonged to. They had to know it wasn't on their land.
Stuff like that is more common than ppl want to think about. Ppl think that they can intrude on what looks like unused or abandoned property hoping they can benefit from it, knowing full well it isn't theirs.
@@salty6pence672the specifics vary state by state, but usually, it's a long time, you have to publicly attest your intention, and you must maintain the property including paying taxes.
This is super common. My city ( very small city ) has a central park area. Having looked at the sat maps and the GIS maps it appears an old car lot building is on city proprety all except for maybe a couple of feet. If the city was to have a survey done at an expensive cost it would clearly show that the building belongs to the city. We also have an old abandoned railroad section that went through the city that was abandonded nearly 50 years ago and it still shows the land as part of the city with no owners of said land. The local coop buildings and grain bins along with their scale is on city land. I have the county looking in to it. Because I am looking at buying some of the land that is part of that railroad section. The land out side the city limits does not have any old easement for the rail road which are 100% long gone.
Who was paying the taxes? Isn't there a yearly tax bill? Sounds like a local/gov scam. Start with the lawyer & builder connection that will tie back to a gov official of some sort. If I were the owner I would keep the land and make it very costly to the scammers. I would NOT settle.
Could backfire. If he plays his cards right he could walk out with both his land AND a free $1.5M house as compensation. You never know what a jury will award, especially if they believe the builders were also scammed by some middle-man. If he plays hard ball he might end up with nothing but his original land plus legal fees.
This is really the key. Property tax records are public in most places. So the county/city were sending the bill to a current address. The lawyer should have known this so he would know who to reach out to for buying the land. It's an easy search. No, someone took shortcuts and probably did it on purpose. They should see a jail cell.
My boss, a land surveyor, bought a vacant, suburban lot in Utah as an investment. Years later, he discovered a half-built house on his property. The builders were supposed to build the house on the next-door lot, but put it on the wrong lot by mistake. My boss made a deal with the builder: they finished the house and sold it to my boss for half-price. He then sold the lot with the brand new house for full price.
@@justiron2999 No, I don't believe. Its so stupid, the builder would just pay for the damages, remove the building, instead of commiting 150% the value and only getting 50% of it (I'm talking about finishing the house, workhours and other expenditures like gas for transportation, physical effort, which isn't directly montised). No sounds like a fake story.
Could this become a criminal case? If, for instance, the LLC contrived the scheme to build and sell the house before the property theft was discovered and leave the new home owners with the problem. They may have a history of defrauding others in similar schemes. The "South African owner" sure sounds like a scam.
You've never gotten an email from Prince Nambutu from South Africa requesting assistance with some property he needs to dispose of? Great guy - I've helped him a few times. He tells me my reward payment will be arriving at my location any day now
The LLC is named 51 Skytop Partners, which is the name of the lot, 51 Skytop Terrace. That implies it's a "disposable" LLC, and whoever built the house knew they were doing something shady. It sounds like the land owner might have just gotten a free house, but good luck holding the LLC owner responsible.
I've got a friend whose family bought property for rental and did the same thing, just named it the address LLC. Nothing shady there, they just wanted a liability shield for renting it out (their tenants are their kids and their friends)
Nothing nefarious with that LLC on the surface. Liability is such that it's smart to own properties in an LLC to avoid everyone and their brother suing you for stupid things, or a single civil case leading to bankruptcy. The rule is this: No matter how much money you have anyone suing you will sue you for everything you have, no matter how small the transgression. This way all they can take is the LLC - unless there's fraud involved of course which I would assume is unlikely here otherwise why bother with an LLC.
I'd be glad if the landowner got ownership of the house rather than destroying it. All that building rubble and fuel to destroy something that took so much fuel and building materials to build -- would be a crime against humanity and our environment to destroy it! Judges should focus on preserving the construction and handing it to the real land owner, rather than destroying the buildings.
@@ce7857 I disagree, a house with 5 bathrooms is a pain to take care of. From the story, I gathered that he was getting on in years and would have used it after his children are gone. A 2 bedroom one bath house would be more energy efficient and have lower labor costs over the decades. Art would also hide better in the trees.
I came up to my small remote ranch that I only visit once a year, and found it to be fenced, and had a water trough and about 8 horses on it. Yes, I pay my property tax, and yes, I checked the county recorder that it was still in my name. So, I hired a local ranch with stables to come up, and round up the horses, take them to the boarding facility, I removed the trough and left a note pinned to the gate; "when you want your horses back, call my atty in 'city' and ask what you owe." Well, lucky enough, several of the horses were worth a LOT of money. Thankfully, I had them boarded and not taken by myself, and I took care of their health and feed. I made over $50,000 on that deal. Plus, I got 20 acres of fencing. The land owner is going to get his land back, and he's likely going to get an unfinished house along with it.
You mentioned an important point. You have to avoid "wasting" when you take property back on occasion. You could not just open the gate and let the horses out. Boarding them was correct.
I would not be surprised to see the damages go much higher than 2 million, given how long it sounds like the plot had been growing. CT is a triple damages tree law state.
Nothing should be interesting about a case like this. The house should be given to the land owner by the court! The land owner shouldn't have to deal with this at all!
@@vt20247 exactly you can't just go building on someone else's land , if you don't own the land you have no business selling it to anyone else and if that person you sold it to builds a house on it then you just gave a the actual landowner a free home, it's like buying a stolen car from someone, the car wasn't theirs to sell in the first place, a quick check on who is paying taxes on that land to the Local Govt would have cleared it up in a flash.
@@MotorsportsX Private keys are called private because they are kept private. You never write private keys down somewhere (like on contracts), instead, you write down the public key and say, only the one who posses the private key matching this public key can sell this property. Proof of ownership: Create a secret random number, encrypt it using the public key hand it over to the seller and ask him for the decrypted random number. If he can name it, he knows the private key and thus is the legitimate owner. All crypto currencies work like this btw.
Back in the 1980s had a neighbouring farmer in a similar situation. A guy build a house with half of the house on the farm property. Farmer ask to be paid for the land, but the land owner being a jerk donated the house to the Catholic Church. Once the Catholic Church saw what happened they returned the house to the donor. Farmer filed law suits, hime owner shit his pants and ended up selling the house to the farmer for pennies on the dollar.
the same thing happened in NSW Australia where the surveyor surveyed the wrong block of land in a small village and the builder built a house on it. The owner of the land lived away and only went top his block of land a couple of times a year and when he say the house on his block he changed to locks and moved in. The courts upheld his claim to the house and the person who had the hose built sued the surveyor and won.
OMG! My hubby is from Windsor and I’ve been to Oz 4x to visit family and friends. Home prices are crazy expensive. Wish someone would accidentally give us a house so we could move to Australia. We’re in America and have good jobs but we don’t make live in Australia money. In 2019 his mom sold her breeze block, 900 sq ft, 3bed-1 bath, 1960 home for $600,000 AUD. That much money would buy you a mansion where we live. She was able to move into a same sized retirement home in Port MacQuarie for the same money.
Sometime in the 1960's my great uncle and wife were on their way across the country and visited their parcel in Las Vegas. It had been between two casinos. But the casinos had been replaced by a much larger one and their land was right under the middle of the newer building. They got and accepted a cash offer on the spot for about 10 times what the parcel would have sold for, but less than it would have cost to remove the middle part of the building from their land.
I have a friend that inherited some farmland. They had not been there for awhile and would only hunt on the property. They came back to plan for the hunt and when they arrived a few houses were built and a sub division was being built. Evidently local government members just took the land.
The only way the land could have been taken is if your friend had not paid the taxes on the land, usually for a couple of years. Government doesn’t usually get into the business of developing land, either. It sounds like a developer might have tried to pull a scam. I hope your friend didn’t let them get away with it!!! If they had paid all the taxes, they might be the new owners of some houses 😜
It is not true that “the only way…is if taxes weren’t paid..” I can tell you for a fact, and would be delighted to provide the evidence, publicly, that local councils in Australia, using a loophole in the local government legislation, with the knowledge of such a loophole of the courts, and title office , have taken- imo stolen, land and other property from the lawful owners, without overdue taxes. It’s a big ponzi scam that enables local councils to hugely profit.
Criminal fraud is one of the things that can pierce the corporate shield, especially if it seems that the LLC was formed expressly to perpetuate the fraud. He should also look into tree law. Most of the new england states have quite ferocious penalties for people who illegally cut down trees on someone elses property. It is not just a simple theft question.
I'm from Franklin vt, we had a year around place on lake Carmi but lots of people had summer camps we had too he over 100 year old maple trees on back of our property we left on vacation for two week came back two of our trees were gone. My father asked everyone Noone would cop to cutting them down so he call police and they figure it out pretty quickly let's just say the fines were crazy and my father ended up owning both camps on the other side. They settled by giving them beauty log cabin camps and 5 acres because they couldn't afford what they were forced to pay my father plus what they owed the town. Less than 1500 people live in that town still today.
I was thinking the same. Seems unlikely the LLC did this intentionally otherwise why both with an LLC which doesn't cover your butt in the event of fraud.
I purchased a pickup truck in Arizona from a Canadian gentleman. He had lived here years back, purchased a piece of property, and left a few vehicles on it when he moved back to Canada when he lost his job. Fast forward 10 years and a neighbor called him asking why there was a crew clearing his lot. Turns out someone from Vietnam or the Philippines, I can't remember which, fraudulently sold his property to somebody who was going to build a house. He was able to get his property back and decided that it wasn't worth the risk to continue to hold a piece of property in another country so he sold the vehicles he had stored there and was going to put the property up for sale.
Just think about all the trouble this scammer had to go through to be able to do this. Finding property where the property owner doesn’t live nearby would be a feat in itself.
This scam almost happened in our office! The true owner called in and said, "what the heck" and it stopped everything. The scammers had fake ID's and all. It is so crazy what is happening these days. I double and triple check the owners of record and ask for DL to verify but, you can't even rely upon this anymore... If suspect you have to just drop it in the attorneys lap and pray they figure it out.
This has been blowing up in the news here in Connecticut for two days now. The true owner was given an offer to sell a few months before this happened. Definitely fishy.
It takes time to get that house to its current building completion. I'm betting the builder found out that they got screwed big time and hoped they could aquire the property. They probably thought if the real owner decided to sell then problems solved. I wouldn't take a single offer until I found out how all this took place. Land was worth 20k at the time undeveloped.
This stuff happens because everyone gets away with being lazy in our society. The attorney, title company, construction company, etc. No one can be bothered to conduct actual due diligence making it easy for scammers.
My neighbor once tried to log off my treeline. There are very strict laws invoving tree harvesting. I had a survey done. The trees were mine so I told the loggers to stop. They didn't want to get involved in a lawsuit so they left. My neighbor was so angry but powerless to do anything.
Such tree laws exist in other countries as well. In Denmark someone bought a house that was located by a large lake, (large for tiny nation Denmark that is). The house could have a fantistic look over the lake, if it was not for some 150-200 year old trees blocking the view. Trees that not only was not located on land belonging to his property, but was also owned by the municipality. The trees had a protected status certified by the authorities. In the everything is digital nation of Denmark, the owner only had to turn on the computer to see that the trees were not on his land, and they were protected. The house owner though had money and thought fuck it. I'll chop down those trees and just pay the fine. He got severely fined by the court, and the court also demanded he restored those trees to the size and the height they previously had. Since such trees were not available anywhere in Denmark. He had to buy them in Sweden. Get them dug up and transported to Denmark and then planted them by the lake. If any of the trees did not grow propperly or later died, the owner would be held accountable, and must procure replacements. This was added as a land registry to the property. Meaning if he sold the property, the new owner would take over this responsibility. In other words his property potentially took a big devaluation.
Only an idiot cuts down trees on a shoreline in a cold country to get a nice view. Those trees stop ice in winter from climbing up the shore and taking out your buildings or stopping ice floes in the spring melt. I have seen it with my own eyes. Seiche winds taking out cottages and homes with lovely views and sparing the places that left the trees.
@TheDilweed No. He was fined for destroying something protected. The court history is quite clear on this matter in Denmark. Last year a guy paid a contractor to remove a sand dune at the beach that was blocking his "view" at the ocean. Both the contractor and the man was fined, but on top of the fine the man was ordered to rebuild the dune to its "previous" state. That means he could not just dump sand there and call it quit, but had to make sure the various plants that can grow in this nutrient poor soil, will actually grow there. If need be, the rebuilding demand could be repeated as many times as needed. Suing the Danish court system!!!! That is not how the law works in Denmark. It does have its fairness principle, so when the trees had been planted and thrived for a while, the man could apply for getting the land registry changed. The point of the order was to make sure he corrected his mistake, and could not just sell the property without informing a new owner of this responsibility.
How is this even possible? Do you know how difficult it is to be able to legally build a house on your own land? Lol. I can't imagine getting the permits to build on someone else's land.
Funny how everything goes smoother (including stealing someone else's land) when you have an inside connection in the government. I bet if you dig a little, there's some connection here to some government insider
So,... wouldn't it be nice if all this LANDOWNER had to do was wait for the govt to condemn this other building and demolish it for him because of lack of valid building permits??? Oh, wait... the govt seemingly only checks up on LAW ABIDING CITIZENS!
My Father bought a piece of property near the interstate, ten acres for non-payment of local property taxes...$102.00 in 1977. Four years later, we drove by, and there was a Holiday Inn on the property. The next day, he sent me at age 15, into the motel with the deed, asking for the manager. My Father was in a wheelchair as a result of WWII. Shock to the manager as a title search did not show the county sale. We settled in court....$220,000. I recently inherited my parents properties...Discovered I own a property that the next door owner built half his home across the property line...Waiting for a response to my letter to the homeowner.
An attorney was involved in that crooked transaction. Had a proper title search been done and the correct owner contacted, the attorney would have done his/her job correctly. Considering that the transaction involved a part of the world known for running dishonest scams, the attorney was either dishonest or negligent due to his/her involvement with this crime.
Happened to my dad too, lost 1.5 acre of a 25 acre property due to improper records keeping (not readily accessible to the public) so it was missed when researched- that the previous owner of the 25 acres had sold the 1.5 acre parcel to a mason for building a chimney on her home on the 25 acres. The previous owner was old and it is assumed she had simply forgotten about the transaction. She died shortly there after and shortly after that the old house burned down leaving only the chimney, where it stood for many years afterwards. My dad also purchased a piece of property in a small subdivision in Florida that was being individually developed by each homeowner but turned out be near worthless due to on going legal problems with the owner/sellers.
This happened to my parents in the 1960s. They had to restore it and remove the part of the house on their land, about 10 feet. I remember the judge wasn't happy about their ignoring the property line
Ignoring the property line is a different situation to buying the land from someone who didn't actually own it in the first place. The builder holds a title to the land, even if it ends up being invalidated.
@@kirkmorrison6131 Yes, but in *this* case, the builder *does* hold title to the land. That was my point. That's a bit different from the neighbor building over the border.
@@thedirtprincess3293 No my parents had their land restored. The people had to remove a paved driveway and remove part of the house. Replace soil and trees
Tree law is expensive. If they cut down trees then they would have to take the hit demolishing the house and loosing all the material cost. Then they have to replace the trees. Not with cheap saplings, but with trees comparable in age and size of the trees that were there. And they have to make sure those trees don't die for a certain amount of years. It would be cheaper for the fake owners to turn over the house and all and get out of demolishing it. In fact, offer to finish the house for him.
RUclips is crawling with grammar Nazis and spelling trolls. I agree with you about the house. Should be his choice if he wants the house as compensation or if he wants it removed and land restored.
@@mikehoncho8890 I'll go him one better: if you can count it you use the word number, if it's quantitative and uncountable you use the word amount: thus-they have to make sure those trees don't die for a certain number of years, undoubtedly by giving them adequate amounts of water.
Lady at work told me someone had put a mobile home on her land without asking. She told the occupants to move it off her land. They wouldn't. She told the company who owned the mobile home to move it. They wouldn't. She had someone dig a trench around that home. The occupants left. The owner of the mobile home likely wasn't being paid so they came to move the home but couldn't due to the trench. They contacted the land owner and asked how to move the home. She firmly told them "Build a bridge!" They left it.
My nieghbor sold her house last November. My new neighbors put up a fwnce in their backyard but it went about 15' onto my property. It was temporary, so I didnt say anything in the winter so his dogs had a place outside. This spring I walked over and introduced myself and showed him the survey stakes. He moved his fence.
They were hopeful you wouldn’t notice and if you did, you wouldn’t mind. No one just moves into a new neighborhood and plants a fence where they want it without knowing they could be violating boundary lines. I don’t think I’d be bringing them a welcome to the neighborhood pie.
@@Garden366 My next door neighbor built a wood stockade fence within inches of my long-established chain link fence which is (barely) on my side of the property line. This leaves no way for either property owner to get in to maintain and manage the weeds growing between the fences. I'm figuring it is the responsibility of the current property owner next door. My fence was there before any of the past three owners of that property were born.
We're still waiting for our neighbor to move her fence that is a few feet into ours all the way down to her back corner. We were the only neighbor who had a surveyor come for a small fenced in area on the side of our house. Both neighbors were on our property. The other one isn't a big deal at our back corner, but this other lady hasn't moved it yet.
I was wondering why you didn't speak about the potential repercussions for the local lawyer who was involed in the fraudulent sale. This individual was granted power of attorney for a theoretical individual (who is in another country). Would they not be liable for the 'sale'. They either knowingly engaged in fraud, or did not do their due diligence to verify who the owner was.
I doubt the attorney will be held accountable. There are probably laws that absolve them from any liability. I think that's why legal matters are written in a whole other language that you need a law degree, or at least have to have learned the language, to understand. I don't understand how contracts like a rental car contact is written in a language I don't understand, yet I'm expected to read it on the spot, understand it, and sign it, when I don't speak, or read, the language. I'm sure there's some law about that which holds me accountable. Almost all people sign these documents without reading, or understanding all the time. In my mind the whole farce is criminal.
@@MrCharlesEldredge It's all in English. If you have good reading comprehension, no legal document should daunt you. If you don't understand the definitions of words ... Then it may be a problem. Just like taxes. No mystery. If you can read, you can do taxes. This is why they said learning English and its rules were important.
I have a coworker who had the issue with trees a few years ago. A neighbour hired a timber company to select cut the rear of the property which abuts my coworker. The timber company cut nearly 250 feet onto my coworkers property, removing 3 mature elms which were certified disease free by a provincial arbourist. This is still going through court.) Both properties are roughly 500 acres so neither my coworker or his neighbour noticed until the following year)
I find it hard to believe that you never mentioned a title company. I have bought many pieces of property and I alwais caution people to never, ever buy a piece of real estate without going through a title company. It's one of the dumbest mistakes you can make in purchasing real estate.
That's exactly what I thought but the article in the NYTs stated the title company would not cover this as it was a case of identity theft (sounds like BS to me). The article also said the rightful owner was contacted last year to see if he was interested in selling the lot for $350K which he turned down. Several months later the bogus sale occurs. There is more going on here.
Title companies still make errors, so ultimately up to the buyer's or sellers to make sure that the Title company has actually done what they are supposed to do. I've had it happen twice to me, in 45 years of buying and selling property.
Listening to a radio show several years ago. A guy called in and said that he had returned to his hometown after about 30 years. The 300 acres he owned was covered with houses. Nice houses. The host of the show asked if he had any intention of doing anything with the property. No....but... Congratulations! You own a lot of houses, or you can have lots of money. The developer had just whipped up a deed so he could sell lots to peoplel.
Unless the state has adverse possession laws. In certain states, if you've occupied a piece of property for 20 years or more and no one contests it through those years, you can legally file a claim for the deed.
When they have a dissolution like that, it's pretty good cause to pierce the corporate veil unless the whole thing was arranged with a secured creditor, such as a bank, getting all the assets. You can't play games with corporations like that, underfund them or dissolve them, to get out of your debts. I think Steve was suggesting they might commit fraud by cutting and running, because I can't think of a legal manner of just dissolving and running from debts without your personal assets being at risk.
@@integr8er66 Of course it is. But you do not get to play games with it. If you underfund your LLC, do not treat it as a real corporation, but merely a shell to avoid liability, the courts will allow creditors and judgment creditors to pierce the corporate veil and go after your personal assets.
If the LLC owner walks away, the property owner will own the semi-finished house. Even if he had to put a few thousand into it, a semi-complete house isn't nothing. A pain in the butt to have a house on your property you didn't design or want? Maybe. But it's certainly better than nothing.
@@MWiggins-m2g Good point. It's actually fairly easy to pierce the veil of an LLC. Members have a tendency to be careless with business transactions thinking they are completely shielded on a personal level. What they don't realize is that if one personal transaction is made through the LLC on their behalf it breaks the shield. An example of this is an LLC that I did the books for. The members ignored my advice to not charge personal items on the LLC credit card. They continued even after I explained the ramifications thinking it was nonsense. They were sued and audit revealed the transactions. Their personal assets were open to the settlement.
Just this past year, I was involved in a slightly similar situation, but as the bad guy. My daughter decided to replace (not repair) the serviceable fence that bounded her backyard. I removed approximately 200' of perfectly good fence and put up the new fence as directed. When I was installing the final picket, I somehow noticed the property flag thirty or so feet out toward the side street and felt something was just not what I expected to see. I checked as closely as I could being that the new fence was up and in place. It appeared to me that my daughter had positioned the new fence centered on the property line. And, that's what she had done. One of the reasons that my daughter had replaced the original fence was for privacy so the new fence was taller than was the original fence. When the neighbor saw that difference, she and my daughter began something only slightly less than the Hatfield and McCoy feud. No shots were fired, but both sides seemed to relish their self-righteous anger. I eventually convinced my daughter that by placing the posts on the property line as opposed to placing the fence totally within her own lot, she had given up her right to the fencing that was on the "Hatfield" side. Maw Hatfield would have been totally within her rights to walk out with an oscillating saw, sledgehammer, and a pry bar, and to remove anything that extended onto her property. The end result was that I got to remove the new fence and build another fence that was completely inside my daughter's property. Mistakes abounded in the entire situation, and all of them were made by us, McCoys. Our first mistake was removing a perfectly good fence. Repair and replacement fall into totally separate categories. Our second and more critical mistake was moving the new fence the two inches inside Ma Hatfield's property.
This is disgusting. Under no circumstances should anything happen *except* these scammers getting prison time and a complete loss on their little plan. No way this was an innocent mistake - there are tax records to show who was paying the taxes that back up the owner.
But do you really want a 4000 sq ft house with 5 bathrooms and 4 bedrooms to clean? Heck, I have a 1000 sq ft house and hate cleaning what little I'm happy in. How much does it cost to heat and cool something that size? And you can't have 4000 sq ft of empty, takes a lot of furniture to have a house like that and you're not gonna want second hands from Goodwill in a nice house like that. No thanks. I'd make him tear it down and put up a nice little bungalow for me to own.
A real estate agent told me of a situation where there was a beautiful piece of river front property that people built their beautiful cabin on. They thought they owned the property. Turns out the legal owner came to check his land and found a beautiful cabin. He got an eviction notice for the people who were living in the cabin they built on land they didn't own. Turns out the cabin builders owned the land across the road. They bought a mobile home to live in and had a view of the beautiful cabin they built and were evicted from.
About 60 years ago I knew a kid that his grandfather gave land on a stream in NH with a nice cabin on it. The cabin was built by someone that didn’t own the property so that was free.
Our neighbors and I are having an issue like this now. A home owner at the bottom of the hill is trying to expand his property by having construction out the back of his land at the top of the hill. He's trying to punch through someone else's property to a private road he doesn't own so he can build houses that will use it for access. He said his next step is to claim part of my land so he can widen the private road he doesn't own for the traffic to homes he's going to build. During his leveling he's already removed boulders off of an adjacent property that will cause erosion problems to the hill they carved out. He's gone as far as to call the police on us saying whites are trying to stop his project because he's hispanic.
This kind of real estate fraud is a growth industry in the US. Often it's started by someone filing a bogus quitclaim deed in the county courthouse and starting the ball of title fraud rolling. A friend of mine who used to buy/rehab old houses once went to a house he owned and found a family living in it and insisting that they were renting it from some out of town owner. It took many months to get the title clear to the point where he could actually sell it.
Title insurance comes into play and the attorney who did the title search has some questions to answer. I'm thinking the title insurer is on the hook for the $300K+ in known losses and whatever the judge decides too. I'm wondering why the title search just didn't verify where the tax bill is going and getting paid from. Seems something shady is going on.
Not really. Most property bills can be automatically billed on the net. And anyway, it doesn't matter much. My stepmother tried to get property my dad had given us kids by our mother his ex-wife. We were all on the property as owners of record, and he had made other provisions for their kids. But we were all young and he paid the taxes, and seeing an opportunity, after he passed she continued to pay the taxes and when whatever the time limit was up she filed. We were all negligent in being so lackadaisical about the taxes for sure. But by the time we paid our lawyers we had to sell it all and didn't realize a dime, even though we prevailed.
A title search would have shown that Daniel Kenigsberg held clear title to the parcel ... because he did. A title search wouldn't reveal that someone who was fraudulently presenting himself as Daniel Kenigsberg, was not in fact Daniel Kenigsberg. " I'm wondering why the title search just didn't verify where the tax bill is going and getting paid from." What would that prove? So they check with the tax office. The tax bills are being mailed to Daniel Kenigsberg at his address of record on Long Island, and they are being paid. That's not inconsistent with someone who is temporarily residing overseas (hypothetically say a 6 month temporary residence at a hospital in Johannesburg) and was having mail forwarded to him, or having someone in the US handle affairs like keeping taxes paid I've worked overseas, for periods longer than 6 months. I didn't switch my address on everything, I just had my mail forwarded.
Hawkmoon, the alternative would be a system where, instead of paying legal fees to protect your property rights, you and your family simply stand armed guard 24/7 to defend it against thieves. That’s how it was before there were surveys and recorded deeds and titles and laws against theft. You think you would like that better? Build fortifications and a moat and be ready to fight off invaders? So when someone with a stronger or better armed group came along, your property became theirs, and you became dead.
@@mikewatkins7618 Moats and castles? What are you even talking about? I was simply suggesting we not have to go bankrupt to defend what is ours. Right or wrong when you’re bank account hits Zero you lose.
This nearly identical situation happened to me in 1984 in Southboro, MA. I owned 3 -1acre lots on a quiet country road. I built and sold the first home and started building the second of three planned homes. I got hurt on the job and needed to take a break from the completion of the 3 home project. I took 4 months off and when I went to the remaining lots to meet the civil engineer who had planned on marking the excavation boundaries. When I got there the wooded lot no longer had any trees on it. There were 200 yr old oaks on the property that were 36” around at the base and 125-175 feet tall. They were ALL GONE and to make matters worse the entire half of the property had an enormous pile of construction debris on it. I picked through that pile for many days looking for anything that could identify what this pile used to be and from where. I found an old notebook tracing it to a building that used to be owned by the Hospital in Framingham. I saw it being torn down but never dreamed it would end up on my property as a pile of trash. Well I ended up on the front page of the paper. It said I HAD DUMPED THIS MESS ON MY OWN PROPERTY. Cmon who would do that? I tracked down the demolition permit on file and traced it to the people that dumped this debris. It cost me @25k in legal fees and over 100k in bank fees from my construction loan. The trucking company when given an ultimatum by my lawyers just Filed Bankruptcy. I got NOTHING from them. I even sued the hospital because it was their trash. But they had a Team of attorneys that made my life a miserable hell. Total cost out of pocket to clean the site , legal fees and interest payments to the bank during this clusterfuck, $164,677.23 Because of their dishonesty and scumbag ways of doing business I lost my shirt on the remaining project. I built the two houses left to do, I sold them at a loss because the market changed drastically in the year it took to straighten up the mess. ALWAYS keep a keen eye on any property you own. Visit OFTEN and post NO TRESPASSING signs everywhere!! Sorry that happened but I know what it’s like. It SUCKS!!! ✌️🇺🇸😎✌️🇺🇸😎
I just recently bought my grandparents house off my parents after my grandparents recently passed away. I couldn’t even imagine somebody being like “well Your options are just take the money for what the house is worth and you’re all good” like that would make it OK.
There was a surveyor in Florida about 11 years ago who signed off on the work and marked the lot that was going to be built on inside a community, only for it to be discovered a while after the massive house was built, that he had flagged the neighboring lot from the one the homeowners actually owned. The homeowners had to not only exchange titles with the other owner, but pay the other person about $45000 extra as the lot they actually had owned was somewhat smaller due to a cliff in one corner. And the error was only discovered when another surveyor who was marking for another lot, noticed that there was a house on the wrong lot.
@@kleverich You are right but often it is the next door neighbor encroaching with a fence or building so a survey will protect. AND, if the owner did have a survey on that parcel done before or even after the purchase it was another solid piece of evidence he WAS the correct owner. Not many will pay for a survey of property they do not own.
50 years a ago I was in a car with my Grandpa and he checked some raw land he own and saw a new house (inexpensive house) built on or near Grandpa's land. Rural area, few houses around. Sure enough 1/2 the house was on Grandpa's land. Owner just didn't check property lines correctly. Grandpa negotiated a deal.
This happens all the time. Once I bought an empty lot from a friend. A few months later I drive by and see a for sale sign in the yard! Some scammer was selling land they didn't own to unsuspecting victims. I removed the sign and reported it to the police. Nothing ever happened after that. And one other time I personally bought a property that had an old abandoned house on it. I arrived to find the house had been demolished by the city 7 days prior due to it looking abandoned. The scammer owned the property and when they realized the city demolished the house they quickly offloaded the property on me not mentioning the house was gone. Even without the house the land was still worth more than I payed. But the new owner (me) is legally required to pay the city $13k for the cost of the demolition. I only paid $3800 and the property was worth $8k. So I had to simply abandon it letting it recycle back into the city's tax auctions.
@@AnthonyJMendoza-f7i not really. If it’s my property I have every right to kick in my front door and if someone places me in fear of grave bodily harm, too bad for them.
There are also scammers who *claim* to own property that has been properly bought and sold. family member of mine bought a house. A year or two later, a letter arrives. The sender claims to be owner of part of the land on which this house/yard are sitting, but he's happy to sell for $10,000. My family member forwarded the information to their title insurance and also to local police, who were already investigating the perpetrator for engaging in this fraud scheme with a lot of nearby property owners.
My old neighbor built his driveway on our current property. We didn't do a land survey until our old neighbor sold the property and we had some disputes with the new owners. I then hired an attorney that told us that if the driveway was built on our land over thirteen years ago, we have lost our land. We found out that in almost each of the 50 states, if somebody takes possession of a piece of land for 13 years (the time varies state to state) they become the owner. To top it all off we pay taxes for it!
It's called adverse possession. A friend of mine's parents lost 10 acres to a neighbor because he "volunteered" to bushhog it for 10+ years. After the 10 years were up, he legally claimed ownership of the property...
My great grandfather was a county judge back in the 1800s. One afternoon the city came through and ripped out trees along to road to widen and pave it, without the consent of the landowners. His property was one of those affected. The city had to pay everyone on the street for each tree. Hearing so much about scammers using LLCs to conduct business, I'd like to hear some discussion of whether there needs to be more scrutiny, regulation, or even a reduction in the protection afforded with LLCs.
So if they put it under an S corp or C corp.....same thing can happen. Anyone can be a scammer using any number of business entities. The LLC just happens to be the easiest one to set up. Stripping protections there only hurts legitimate small businesses.
Steve, I took L101 and L102 as part of my business degree back in 1989 - it helps me still till this day. Your videos remind me of days and the important lessons. Thanks for all you do. Great job.
This one really upset me. He probably played in that vacant yard as a kid and cared for those individual trees. It's a bit like killing somebody's pet. You just can't set a cash value on it.
Unfortunately in most states pets are legally valued the same as livestock. They have no real value by criminal law. You have to go to civil court for that.
Depending upon how it plays out, I'd assume that there might be a way to bypass the issues with the LLC if it's created for this if it's connected to the fraud getting the land.
Good point. The LLC might very well be a part of the scam. That thought crossed my mind at the start of the video. Perhaps set up with an LLC to avoid liability if they are discovered. As Steve mentioned they could abandon the LLC. It is kind of odd that this particular property was purchased by multiple people using an LLC. Potentially sketchy.
Wouldn’t the property taxes still be being paid by the real owner. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to get some kind of communication to the real owner through town records
@@B_Bodziak yes but when you pay your property taxes there is usually if you pay with check another address associated with the check when it’s mailed. if it’s credit depending on how each town does it your info would have up to date with the town.
update on this case from CT Insider dated 1/03/2024. Everyone involved is suing each other. FBI also involved, linking it to a similar scam in Rhode Island, with money funneled to a Florida account. The Developers claim they were scammed, and they are suing the attorney that represents them AND the attorney who represented the selling company, a real estate firm. The legal owner of the property has filed another suit in CT court, under another statute (unfair trade practices?) seeking to increase damages.
In 2001 my friend's dad passed and he left him a little under an acre in the michigan and Trumbull area. It appraised for a couple thousand in 2002. A couple years ago it was appraised for a little under 2 million. He couldnt sell fast enough
I had someone say they had power of attorney over an estranged relative who my mother gave property to before she died. They opened probate on my mother added this persons name as an heir to my mothers estate. They listed assets that belonged to me into this probate case. I hired an attorney that told me she resolved the matter, then when I went to sell my property the title company emailed me and said I had to go to court because the case was still open. My attorney disappeared after closing her firm 4 years prior to when I tried to sell the property. The perpetrators knew my attorney disappeared, perhaps paid her to disappear, not sure. The perpetrators hired an attorney who transferred the title from my mother and myself into the name of that estranged relatives name, they said the perpetrator bought a note against the property and added their name to the title as well. Then they closed probate, and opened another case. The new case was a partition and a foreclosure suit filed against me. The court gave them the property, they filed a deed signed electronically for my and the estranged relatives signatures claiming they sold the property. The court paid the perpetrators fraudulent "Note "" and his attorney fees at closing. They paid claims for debts 10 years after my mother died out of my homestead property. Then the same attorney for the perpetrators (with fake POA ) he was then paid a second time 10 months after closing of this sale of my home. He filed another claim for attorney fees for representing the estranged relative, who mind you never met this attorney or signed any POA. No one stopped the fraudsters no matter who I called. Florida courts only speak to or hear from attorneys ? They ignore pro se property owners? They notified me of hearings , if I tried to speak to or in front of the judge at these hearings they cut me off. I Then I would be muted till end of hearing. Later Id be muted upon entering the meeting , and eventually stopped notifying me of the hearings entirely. Seems to be an elaborate scheme carried out through use of technology because I never once saw anyone in person. The court house employees were not helpful when I would go to talk about this matter. It seriously felt like we are under marshall law throughout the experience. Police never answer the phone for non emergency, the emergency line works, but when they come they dont file a report or investigate . Local government must be corrupt AF in this county. What a shit show. Glad your friend could sell his home. ANy good attorneys out there brave enough to investigate public corruption please reach out.
"tree law" - Looking on Google maps, the plot is nicely wooded, and now completey cleared - so thats a lot of mature trees which need replacing, plus the timber costs of the removed wood.
This story is so odd. Even vacant land has a parcel number ( lot & block ) attached to it. The owner of the property is listed as well. It's public record and not hard to find. How does anyone complete real estate transactions without a title company? 🤔🧐
The general idea is that the LLC doesn't WANT to do due diligence. If they can get the house built and sold, pocket the money, then disband the LLC it becomes exceptionally difficult for anyone to actually hold them liable for their actions. The whole point of having an LLC for this is so that any money it makes can be handed to the owners, but the owners personal assets are protected from any creditors (including most court judgements). So even if this guy wins, he gets his property back, but it's near impossible that he'll ever be paid for the damages.
@@nodak81 I understand that, but the owner's address is also listed. They don't just put a name on the property. They also show where the tax bills are mailed to. They go to the actual property owner, unless they have a mortgage.
Worked with a guy who inherited land from an uncle. There were two houses on the lot, one was his uncles and the other was free. A builder built one on the wrong side of the plot line after his uncle had gone to the nursing home. It was a mistake, this guy at work didn’t want the lot, and sold it with both houses on it. I don’t remember the final outcome but it was a mess.
Very interesting video. I don't know you, Steve Lehto, but I wish I did. I agree with your points. I retired from the Army in 1989 and moved to Mississippi because my spouse's father split his 120-acre rural property among his three children. We became property owners of a 40-acre plot. Many years before that my father-in-law installed a road culvert on the outside edge of the property. As neighbors sometimes do, he allowed the property owner to use it to cross the road ROW ditch into his neighbor's land, also. Time marches on... After a tour of 2 years in Korea and my Army retirement my wife and I built a house on the property. A few years later the neighbor erected a three-strand barbed wire fence that encroached onto my property and sectioned off the driveway culvert onto his property. In other words, he didn't erect the fence on the property line. He also installed a locked metal gate. When I approached his child who inherited the property after his death to dispute the fence location that fellow declared "Eminent Domain" laws made the property his. Of course, it traveled many hundreds of feet down the property line. He planted pine tree saplings after erecting the fence, also.
I know quite a bit about criminal law, but really enjoy Steve explaining various civil and case laws, which are foreign to me, but of great interest. 😎
That happened to the property my brother bought. The previous owner built a garage next to his house. After it was done the property owner showed up and had his property surveyed and the garage was on his property. He did give the homeowner his costs back, but put permanent stakes on all his properties.
I was owned a lot next to my home. Two years after I purchased it the same lawyer who closed the sale to me also closed a sale to another person. You would think that this lawyer might have been aware of the title in my name. The second sale was voided and this lawyer later became the mayor of our town.
Something similar happened to an acquaintance of mine. The acquaintance bought a run down house that hadn't been lived in in years, apparently halfway through a renovation. After my acquaintance got halfway through her own renovations she was notified by the police that she had been scammed because the the person who sold the house to her didn't own it. It was discovered because the scammers had scammed other people the same way, by finding pieces of property that appeared to be abandoned and then "selling" them. The title insurance company reimbursed her for the cost of the purchase, but not sure about the improvements. The actual owner got a new roof and some other improvements, so probably wasn't complaining.
Update, they stopped construction on the house! That case, in state Superior Court in Stamford, and Kenigsberg's federal case in New Haven (moved from Hartford) are both pending. Talks toward a settlement have yielded no results so far but more sessions are scheduled in January. Both cases have numerous motions flying about in which parties are seeking to lessen their liability
Even if the LLC pulls the plug and disappears, the court can still award the property owner clear title to the house, thereby giving him something of value ("Thanks for the free house, guys!") and depriving the LLC of its "investment." Any way you slice it, these crooks should not be rewarded.
I don't think the LLC is the crook here. It seems like the LLC bought the property (or believed they brought the property) from someone fraudulently claiming to be the owner. Even the owner's attorney says it doesn't appear the LLC was a part of the scam.
@@alanm2842 Whatever the pecking order turns out to be, the legitimate property owner should be at the top (after Uncle Sam, of course, but good luck fighting that). And a purported U.S.owner who lives in South Africa should be a major warning flag.
@@alanm2842 I'm guessing that the lending bank, if there is one, is in as bad a position as the LLC. Generally, the Bank secures it's loan with an ownership interest in the property (deed of trust or mortgage) granted by the purchaser, but in this case the LLC didn't own the property, so couldn't have granted the bank any interest. So the bank's loan is unsecured. So, if the LLC becomes insolvent as a result of this mess (very likely) then the bank will be fighting over scraps, along with the builders subcontractors and the building suppliers, instead of foreclosing and recovering the outstanding loan.
@@andrewalexander9492 Uh...if the bank issued a traditional construction loan, it should have title insurance (to protect the lender, not the builder nor eventual homeowner). I think that's industry standard (certainly is in Florida and California).
The party who purchased the parcel (should) have purchased and paid for title insurance. Depending on the limits of that policy, they (title insurance company) would be on the hook for the value of the land. As for the construction loan, secured by the new structure, I'd be curious about a similar policy and/or coverage (and what parties are covered). Will stay tuned for a follow up. Thanks Steve!
Yep depending on creditor arrangement, the LLC may have very little monetary investment and can walk away with a profit leaving everyone else holding the bag. Sounds like what an entitled karen gov official would do with their lawyer.
I seriously doubt that there is anyone involved, other than the LLC/scammer. They probably didn't actually get far enough into the scam to get an actual buyer.
@@clayed3311 Even if a buyer were to pay cash, then it would still need to go into an escrow account to be held until the close of sale. If it were on the up and up. All the same, the local and state laws may still require that a record of title search and/or insurance and homeowner's insurance is still in place and part of the conveyance deed before the deed can convey. It all depends on the law. What idiot is going to fork over cash for a property or a million dollar house without some guarantee of legitimacy? I think this is just a scam that got nipped in the bud.
Tax bills were sent out and paid, this is public info. All this could be checked on line, to see the owner of the property. The llc was trying to pull a fast one.
In NB Canada, all real estate transactions have to be done with government issued photo ID. The lawyers have to have copies and have to see you in person or on camera. Also, all properties have their surveys registered with gps coordinates. Makes for fewer boundary disputes.
There were a lot--probably the majority--of residential surveys completed in the USA that predate gps. Also, if (for example) a title company were to provide title insurance, that insurance would probably also cover any "liens, encumbrances or defects in the title." Lots of moving parts in property ownership: not just identity and boundaries.
Even stricter here in Germany - real estate deals have to be officiated by a registered notary, who checks the IDs of everyone involved, makes sure everyone taking part actually comprehends what is about to take place and does due diligence for a couple of weeks. Only after that you're cleared to pay for the purchase. The whole process costs an arm and a leg, but this kind of fraud is much less prevalent as a result.
They aren't GPS coordinates, as those can change, regularly. What they are registered with, is a METES and BOUNDS legal description. That can even include landmarks, unique to the land. Go onto google and query a 'metes and bounds' legal description example.
I sold my house last year. Not once did it involve a pen and paper signature. Heck, I could've just used a computer typing my name but insisted to use something at least close to my John Hancock but made with a mouse. It's way too easy these days. With all the tech we have, selling a house should involve fingerprints, videos... it's the most important asset most people ever own, and they swung open the door for this sort of fraud.
Electronic signatures are legal. Your identity would have been verified beforehand. It just eases the burden of having hand signatures, especially if there are multiple offers, counter-offers, addendums, etc. Otherwise, you may as well just camp out at the REALTOR's/attorney's office. It is a matter of convenience, AFTER you've already proven your identity and right to convey the property.
In Arizona, they show the actual deed paperwork WITH legal signatures online for ANYONE to see. It helps with honest research, but also helps out the fraudsters.
This is a scam that has been going on fo years. Companies are selling a service that protects land owners from being scammed out of their land or homes. It is really quite easy to take over deeds. The ease at which people can take a persons identity for these types of scams have made incidents like these almost commonplace. You are absolutely correct. the person should get clear title to the property he already had clear title to. Only if he is willing to make a deal with these people. , who are probably well aware of their trespass, should the house remain.
On this side of the world, a judgement against a company can be the court-appointed sheriffs against any and all assets belonging to the company. As in, they can seize enough assets to cover the debt plus court and collection costs.
@@melkiorwiseman5234 A judgement forfeiture and seizure can only be enforced by the jurisdictional authority. Good luck with enforcement of that in another country. Its hard enough to get intrastate and interstate authorities to cooperate.
@@shelleythompson-brock6412 I know it's either not possible or a horribly complicated matter across countries. However in my country, cross-state jurisdiction probably wouldn't be a problem. If you know that the person you have a claim against is in a different state (which you should, since you wouldn't get a debt judgement otherwise), you just choose the High Court in that state to execute the judgement. It's basically a 2-step process. Go to local court and have a hearing where you present your case for a "judgement debt" and the other party (if they decide to) can argue why they shouldn't have to pay. If they're ordered to pay but don't, you can then ask to transfer the matter to the High Court for collection. Once that's done, the local sheriff does the rest.
@@melkiorwiseman5234 I'm in the US, and its only US legalities that I address. As I've already stated, there may/may not be intrastate/interstate cooperation. It depends on the situation and the degree of criminality committed by that person. A person or other entity can own property or other assets in a multitude of locations. Those assets/properties could be part of indelible trusts, or a plethora of other reasons why they're protected from forfeiture or seizure. There are a number of reasons why a Judgement is just 'a piece of paper against a piece of paper', as Steve mentioned. I've had judgements issued against others, and it doesn't guarantee that you'll receive one red cent. It only shows a legal right to that compensation. It doesn't enforce payment. By garnishment, with-holding, or any other means. It certainly doesn't warrant or guarantee that law enforcement will use their resources to act as a debt collector for you, nonetheless, chase someone down beyond jurisdictions. Its just not the way that the real world works. Nice dream, though.
Isn’t this the kind of situation that title insurance is supposed to cover? I wonder why that was not discussed. Also, if property taxes were regularly paid on the lot, the address of the payer ought to have been in the public record.
@@B_Bodziak That’s the point. If the LLC paid for title insurance, the title company would be on the hood, not them for the value of the land at a minimum.
Yes this is exactly what title insurance covers. If the LLC got an owners policy then the insurer pays out policy limits for full failure of title. If they didn’t then that is probably the worst decision they ever made
Whoever is providing the construction loan is probably scrambling trying to play CYA. Builders insurance agent is looking for loopholes to deny coverage !
@@B_Bodziak That depends on law. Many states require that a title search be performed and insured before a conveyance is recorded and legalized. In fact, I can't think of a single state that doesn't require it, even on a quit-claim deal.
I owned a taxed vacant property lot for like 10 years and one day found it was developed into a parking lot. The police would not support my claim stating it was civil not criminal. I found out that the person using it had rented property adjacent to mine and confused the location. I their view they had full rights to my property. As it turned out they had rented what was adjacent to my property from the department of transportation who told me there was nothing they could do about it because they didn't tell the renter to develop my land. I informed the two DOT representatives in a meeting that I would sue the DOT, the state, and both of them as they had signed the rental agreement for lack of use of my property and would be looking to recoup a substantial dollar amount for that loss of use as well as all previous rental income they had received with interest. They left the meeting and returned in 5 minutes stating they would inform the tenant that their rental agreement was now voided and that they were illegally using my land which they must immediately vacate.
My dad had a relative that owned a vacant piece of land in Florida in the 60’s or 70’s. When he went back down after a couple of years to check on it he found an entire plaza built on it. So he was the proud owner of a shopping plaza after it went through the courts.
Wow, that's the easy way to retirement I guess.
Except that after 7 years of land being unclaimed and someone builds on it, the owner releases ownership
Edit- it's called Adverse possession and my comment is referring to the comment I replied to and not the video*
@@Ginger_scrapzbut it wasn't 7 years and they built it before the court case anyways
@@Ginger_scrapzyeah no that's not how any of that works.
I’d tell them replace the trees at the 3x cost and leave the house or give me 4 million
50 years ago, my wife and I bought a building lot. We had a title search and title insurance. We build a house and moved in. Two years later I received a letter from a lawyer saying his client owned my lot. He demanded $1000 a month rent. I turned the matter over to the title insurance company. The supposed owner had purchased the lot from someone who didn’t own it. Never heard from him again.
Congratulations, you are one of the first people that I have encountered that actually had a successful use of their title policy.
Most people don't even know that's why you pay for title insurance. They research ownership before you close escrow, and it's on them if it's a mistake
@@machintelligence I've had to use mine at a couple of different properties, but those were more surveying issues.
Never heard from the guy wanting rent? I guess. Read that 3 times. I guess that was the resolution. .
@@chrischeehan2423 That article Steve quoted from claimed that title insurance doesn't cover you if fraud is involved. Doesn't make sense because, isn't that the whole purpose of title insurance - that you get a valid title.
I had a similar in Oregon. I bought 20 acres planning to build once I retired but it was vacant for 10 years. When I went back here is a house ON MY LAND still under construction . It did work out. 1.5 ft of the house encroached on LOCAL TRIBAL LAND. I contacted the tribe council and elders. I signed an easement for them to drive to town across my land. That changed their drive to town from 17 miles to 2 miles. An elder called me and said "Taken care of. Come home" They knocked the entire house down to the foundation. My new house is nearly done now and the tribe paved the easement road. I finished the road from my land to the easement. Everyone won
Nice!!!😊😅😅😂
Thanks be!!!😘👌👍❤
Not the guy building the 1st house
Amazing way to handle that!
This needs a documentary or something made on it.
How difficult would it have been for the lawyer representing the fraudulent seller to check tax records to determine the address where tax bills were sent? It would have been obvious that the South African wasn’t the true owner.
I have a feeling it was the lawyer that planned the whole thing.
@@AdamWilberLikesBeer or the LLC
Exactly
in a lot of places that information is available on line
@@jame3shookThe LLC was probably made to enable the scam. It was named after the neighborhood.
I think the first thing they should check is whether the lawyer who claimed to have Power Of Attorney is involved with the LLC, and find out if the money that was paid for the property went anywhere other than his bank account.
Absolutely. First person to look at. Probably the builder's attorney.
I have a feeling a attorney is about to get disbarred and tossed in jail!!
The lawyer is either incompetent or corrupt. There is no third choice.
Follow the money on this one will answer all queries.
@@gretchenk.2516no one said you had to be an attorney to have a power of attorney. But in your effort to correct someone you missed out on the fact it was an attorney that had it.
this actually happened to the family member of a friend... in fact even worse.. they levelled the ranch house that was his grandmother's.. in its original MCM condition.. .. he got a phone call from an angry relative.. "why are you tearing grandma's house down...".. 'Huh? I was just there last week and turned the heat on for the winter".. by the time he got over there the house was partially pushed off the foundation.. after a year worth of lawsuits.. a select group of individuals had to **PAY** to have the ORIGINAL house rebuilt to the spec it was in... Lots of handmade cabinets, carefully saving aertifacts that were saveable like the sinksand toilets that hadnt broken.. down to wrought iron railings.. it cost them a ton of money.. and when the LLC threatened to fail he just offered to sue the individuals and pursue criminal charges for fraud.. that shut em up quick...
It's odd that threatening to sue them as individuals worked. The whole point of an LLC is to shield the individuals. In fact, it's odd that the LLC didn't just immediately declare bankruptcy and walk away.
@@commontater1785it may not that they would have lost, but they may not have wanted to go through all those expenses/time to win in the end
@@commontater1785 if there is an attempt to defraud arent the individuals liable beyond their LLC? and by defraud it comes down to how the damages were going to be paid out.. obviously an LLC should protect individuals in a business mistake.. it can be argued that getting o nthe wrong property as damaging as it is.. is simply a mistake or can be.. however if attempts to defraud were made in trying to buiold back a cheap tract home.. or in this case they REALLY just wanted to buy the property for a premium.. so lets say he could prove a conspiracy to flatten the wrong house instead of the proper one next door in hopes the owner sells so they have a plot of adjacent parcels that look a whole lot better to redevelopers than parcels with one decent sized one missing.. I believe thats where he was trying to go with it .. I think it put the fear in that of they lost the civil suit then local prosecuters might be looking at a legal charge that comes with real Jail.. so instead they rebuild the house and all walk away..
@@commontater1785 Not odd if it can be proven that the bankruptcy was intended to shield the owners of the LLC from fraud charges. That would be Racketeering. It is in Las Vegas.
@@ramoncotta1264 Right, but in this case, it wasn't the LLC that committed the fraud. They were also victims. I mean, can they be expected to fund the LLC up to a level that anticipates all expenses wasted, no return on investment, plus we have to pay damages?
The law firm which took power of attorney should be sanctioned and face disbarment. They should have done their due diligence and verified the person was who they claimed they were.
" due diligence" Is the magic words no defense lawyer want to hear and the courts love. I worked for a law office for 15 years before starting my own Para-Legal business all the land owners legal team has to do is use those two words, Game Over. The land owner can name his price and terms it will never get to a court room I am sure the LLC will not want to take a roll of those dice
And be investigated to see if they have a history of doing this.
@@davidvincent1093 well, if something like this happens, due diligence was not performed and they're liable at the end of the day.
But, we both know how well a diligent lawyer documents everything that they do, accounting for documents, document revisions, time spent on a client's behalf, etc. A diligent lawyer can bury anyone claiming a lack of due diligence in so much documentation as to make their attorney surrender and a jurist laugh.
Learned that setting up their time/documentation tracking software and migrating old records over to the new system.
What really blows my mind is that the sale of property presumably involves the city as well. They have no records of who currently owns the property and no contact info? I suppose the power of attorney would immunize the city from liability, but every party involved had to bushwhack through red flags to get here. Hard to imagine at least one of them wasn't knowingly acting criminally and should be held to account.
@@bvoyelr well, it's obviously impossible for a county to perform a title search. That's just crazy talk.
Which is the very first thing that is supposed to be done when transferring property, at least if done by a licensed realtor or attorney.
So yeah, they bushwhacked through a forest of red flags, leaving the developer stuck with a yard full of rakes to run through.
A friend was just searching on real estate site. Saw a house for sale at an address that a friend in another state used to live at, and let them know. Turned out it was his grandparent lot, left it and a house to him, before he left for top prison jobs in other states. He was married when he got it, and divorced before he left. So he called his local lawyer to investigate. Ex-wife and new contractor husband filed property transfer papers, did not file for construction permits, rebuilt and expanded the house, got a buddy to "inspect" the house, and put up for sale. Currently both are in federal jail no bail. Lake Springfield, IL.
I could tell you a few more similar stories about goings on in IL. Corruption is a way of life here.
At least it has a happy ending.
@@Troy_Built Chicago was very "mobby."
Outstanding, I love happy endings.
If all contractors on Long Island went to jail for doing shady work there will be no contractors left. I could imagine what else they do. I seen 95% bad work. The house I live in now ground was not prepared right and cracks everywhere.
Thanks for doing a story from my state. I am a few towns away from this. There have been a couple of small updates. The lawyer who held the fraudulent POA will not speak publicly on this and has been named in the suit. The builder is claiming to be a victim and has filed to be removed from the suit. All construction has stopped on the site. Apparently, the South African doppelganger used the wrong date of birth, and some other identifiers didn't match up, so due diligence was not done at all in this case.
Thanks for the update. It's always interesting to find out what happened after the date of the video.
Thank you!
Yes, I've been following too having driven that route near Sacred Heart many times. That lawyer has some 'splainin to do as does the original listing agent. The real owner had been easy to contact through a basic google search.
Likely a common scam
@@kaptaan_original Identity Theft is a very common scam, yet, but it sounds like the Lawyer the LLC hired are incompentent and dropped the ball.
The law firm involved in this case has multiple lawsuits against them on other properties. This is a much bigger story than alluded to here.
That makes sense with the "South African" thrown into the mix. I'm surprised they didn't buy the land from a Nubian Prince.
Someone at the law firm, or someone who worked for the city (or both) had to be involved here. I'm not surprised.
If it was my property I would give them 60 days to demo the house and return the lot to its original state or sell the house and give me the proceeds!..otherwise I would file criminal and civil charges.
@@mrabrasive51 Sell the house? It's on your land, that's just transferring the problem.
Thats the story i want to hear!!!
Unique property is a thing. I knew someone who had property taken to build a road. The thing is he had a grass runway for his airplane. The state ended up giving him an abandoned airport to replace his land. He was very happy with the outcome.
Wow I've never heard of something like that before. Must of been a great deal for him 😂
Grass runway which may or may not be hard to see at night/ in bad weather conditions vs a whole abandoned airport that you can set up to accommodate bad weather/trying to land at night I know what I’d choose 😂
That’s awesome
@@AllantitanWell on the surface yes of course, especially if it has a hanger, but it could be hundreds of miles away too, making it useless.
Upkeep of the tarmac would be expensive though! But if its at least in climate that doesn't really experience freezing temperatures during the year, it wouldn't be as bad.
I worked in the mortgage industry as a closing agent for 20 years. I’d conducted nearly 9000 closings in all phases of refinancing and purchases.
There was people from time to time that had no ID or a ‘ID’ that was not acceptable. Without proper ID I would not conduct the closing. It happened at least 50 times and I knew in my gut that something shady was going on. Some were furious and I stood my ground. No ID No Deal.
I would adjourn the closing after speaking with Title and they backed me up. Oh and the geriatric closings. Folks who didn’t know what they were doing we’re not coherence and family members were there trying to coerce them to sign and I said I can’t do this. There’s no way these people do not know what they’re doing. I will not be a party to conducting a closing with somebody who has dementia, and not all their faculties they don’t know what they’re doing.
Again, irate customers, but oh well, my career and everything I ever worked for, is not gonna get taken away, because I did not do my due diligence to verify identification, and who was signing at the table.
". I will not be a party to conducting a closing with somebody who has dementia, and not all their faculties they don’t know what they’re doing."
People are absolutely disgusting.
I've heard of Ex-Wives going to nursing homes to do stuff like this to their ex-husbands, but to your own family?
People are absoluteyl sick.`
It makes me so mad to read stuff like this.
Good work Deb.
Geriatric closings - a Revocable Trust, would avoid this problem, and avoid the time + expense of Probate Court. It also allows to skip a generation of taxes, if setup correctly.
I'm a Notary loan signing agent as well, and I've experienced the exact same things! I've had a few family members meet me at their Dad's nursing home to get him to sign a power of attorney. He was suffering from dementia and he was heavily medicated. They were literally trying to hold the pen in his hand to sign the document for him. I walked out. Not losing my license for anyone. Period. There were many more instances of family members/spouses speaking for the signer and trying to cover up the fact that dementia or straight-up intimidation is afoot. There are Crazy people out there!
@@patriciatyler1193 It's so sad how American is just so selfish to the point where FAmily is nothing. I will say, that even though it's sad to see this for the fathers.... I can imagine how awful of a parent some of these parents were to their children.
My Grandfather sold a corner lot on Ventura Bvld to a builder who was building a high rise building and went broke a new owner told him he would not be paying for the lot .My Dad was a Lawyer and told the new owners to come and meet their new business partner who would take a share of the rents on the high rise. They brought the money within three days after they tried to bluff an old man.
And hope there was a price rise.
@@who-gives-a-toss_Bear No he had owned a broken down gas station on the corner and it might have needed to have the soil removed due to possible leaking tanks so he just took the money I think it was 60 k back in the 70s I think my Dad wanted to own a piece of the building but did what my Grandfather told him to do.
@@Dwayne-mb2uj Smart move. Those EPA Superfund laws regarding contaminated soils are EXPENSIVE REMEDIATIONS.
My neighbor built a deck on my property and he thought i was a complete asshole for telling him to tear it down. I paid for a survey that proved it was on my property. He still didn't believe me. He paid for a survey from a different company and got the same bad news. I even told him I'd split the property down the middle and sell him half. No he wanted my land for free. I had to finally get a lawyer and put a lien on his property. He tore it down.
I showed a neighbor where the stakes were from the last survey and he said it was for the power company. (All the power wires are above ground.) The stakes had the business name on them and a local phone number. They magically disappeared shortly after.
Don't you love when somebody thinks you're the bad guy because they screwed up.
@@billyjoejimbob75 If by "stakes" you mean the permanent survey monument- usually a capped iron pipe (pin), rebar, or (on pavement) a magnetic nail- removing those is a crime pretty much everywhere. However sometimes surveyors put wooden stakes next to the monument to make it more visible - you can rip those out without fear of jail.
@@brokenrecord3095 Some kind of metal spike or pipe with an orange plastic cap on top.
@@billyjoejimbob75 I think that is the monument brokenrecords is talking about, I got yelled at when i was a little kid running around town looking for scrap material to use in building the neighborhood kids treehouse in the woods, they said something like what brokenrecords said, its a fine to remove them, and its rude and they are not scrap.
Years ago when I was living in CT a friend went home after work to find that his driveway had been freshly paved. The driveway that was supposed to be paved was next door. He DID thank the pavers for the free paving job. Talk about having your day made.
Then there was the guy who came home one day and found that his lawn was missing! Somebody stole his lawn! Well, the sod company had got the wrong address. The guy agreed when they offered to reseed his lawn and to restore it to better-than-original condition.
That's awesome
Neighbors built a lovely cabin across the creek from me. New neighbors next to me moved in, got survey, found cabin was 100% on their land (which we had guessed.) It was disassembled the next week, and moved up the hill closer to the house it belonged to. They had to know it wasn't on their land.
Stuff like that is more common than ppl want to think about. Ppl think that they can intrude on what looks like unused or abandoned property hoping they can benefit from it, knowing full well it isn't theirs.
I believe if you occupy the land unattested for a period of time it can become yours.
You should have given them trespass notices and enjoyed your new cabin.
@@salty6pence672the specifics vary state by state, but usually, it's a long time, you have to publicly attest your intention, and you must maintain the property including paying taxes.
This is super common. My city ( very small city ) has a central park area. Having looked at the sat maps and the GIS maps it appears an old car lot building is on city proprety all except for maybe a couple of feet. If the city was to have a survey done at an expensive cost it would clearly show that the building belongs to the city.
We also have an old abandoned railroad section that went through the city that was abandonded nearly 50 years ago and it still shows the land as part of the city with no owners of said land. The local coop buildings and grain bins along with their scale is on city land. I have the county looking in to it. Because I am looking at buying some of the land that is part of that railroad section. The land out side the city limits does not have any old easement for the rail road which are 100% long gone.
Who was paying the taxes? Isn't there a yearly tax bill? Sounds like a local/gov scam. Start with the lawyer & builder connection that will tie back to a gov official of some sort. If I were the owner I would keep the land and make it very costly to the scammers. I would NOT settle.
Could backfire. If he plays his cards right he could walk out with both his land AND a free $1.5M house as compensation. You never know what a jury will award, especially if they believe the builders were also scammed by some middle-man. If he plays hard ball he might end up with nothing but his original land plus legal fees.
That same article Steve quoted from mentioned that the actual owner was paying property taxes on that lot all along.
Who was fronting the money for construction of the house? There is a disconnect to this.
This is really the key. Property tax records are public in most places. So the county/city were sending the bill to a current address. The lawyer should have known this so he would know who to reach out to for buying the land. It's an easy search. No, someone took shortcuts and probably did it on purpose. They should see a jail cell.
@@jamesstainback2369 That Assumes the lawyer was doing things 100% legal but sounds like they might been doing things very shadey.
My boss, a land surveyor, bought a vacant, suburban lot in Utah as an investment. Years later, he discovered a half-built house on his property. The builders were supposed to build the house on the next-door lot, but put it on the wrong lot by mistake. My boss made a deal with the builder: they finished the house and sold it to my boss for half-price. He then sold the lot with the brand new house for full price.
you expect me to believe the builder ate half the loss and continued to finish the house knowing he was going to eat the loss?
@@AugustusOmega half of something is better than 0% of nothing and nothing is what builder would've got after litigation by rightful owner of land.
@@casey4602Bingo
@@AugustusOmegaYes I expect you to believe that instead of going through a lengthy court cost and loss.
@@justiron2999 No, I don't believe. Its so stupid, the builder would just pay for the damages, remove the building, instead of commiting 150% the value and only getting 50% of it (I'm talking about finishing the house, workhours and other expenditures like gas for transportation, physical effort, which isn't directly montised). No sounds like a fake story.
Could this become a criminal case? If, for instance, the LLC contrived the scheme to build and sell the house before the property theft was discovered and leave the new home owners with the problem. They may have a history of defrauding others in similar schemes. The "South African owner" sure sounds like a scam.
It does sound like something a SA Dutch person would do. They do have a history, of doing these sort of things.
Most definitely ,especially if that state operates within the statute of frauds
I wonder if the 'South African' owner speaks with a Nigerian accent.
@@gregb6469 they more then likely speak and sound like Musk.
You've never gotten an email from Prince Nambutu from South Africa requesting assistance with some property he needs to dispose of? Great guy - I've helped him a few times. He tells me my reward payment will be arriving at my location any day now
The LLC is named 51 Skytop Partners, which is the name of the lot, 51 Skytop Terrace. That implies it's a "disposable" LLC, and whoever built the house knew they were doing something shady. It sounds like the land owner might have just gotten a free house, but good luck holding the LLC owner responsible.
I've got a friend whose family bought property for rental and did the same thing, just named it the address LLC. Nothing shady there, they just wanted a liability shield for renting it out (their tenants are their kids and their friends)
Nothing nefarious with that LLC on the surface. Liability is such that it's smart to own properties in an LLC to avoid everyone and their brother suing you for stupid things, or a single civil case leading to bankruptcy. The rule is this: No matter how much money you have anyone suing you will sue you for everything you have, no matter how small the transgression. This way all they can take is the LLC - unless there's fraud involved of course which I would assume is unlikely here otherwise why bother with an LLC.
I'd be glad if the landowner got ownership of the house rather than destroying it. All that building rubble and fuel to destroy something that took so much fuel and building materials to build -- would be a crime against humanity and our environment to destroy it! Judges should focus on preserving the construction and handing it to the real land owner, rather than destroying the buildings.
@@ce7857 I disagree, a house with 5 bathrooms is a pain to take care of. From the story, I gathered that he was getting on in years and would have used it after his children are gone. A 2 bedroom one bath house would be more energy efficient and have lower labor costs over the decades. Art would also hide better in the trees.
@@ce7857 BS!!
I came up to my small remote ranch that I only visit once a year, and found it to be fenced, and had a water trough and about 8 horses on it. Yes, I pay my property tax, and yes, I checked the county recorder that it was still in my name. So, I hired a local ranch with stables to come up, and round up the horses, take them to the boarding facility, I removed the trough and left a note pinned to the gate; "when you want your horses back, call my atty in 'city' and ask what you owe." Well, lucky enough, several of the horses were worth a LOT of money. Thankfully, I had them boarded and not taken by myself, and I took care of their health and feed. I made over $50,000 on that deal. Plus, I got 20 acres of fencing. The land owner is going to get his land back, and he's likely going to get an unfinished house along with it.
You mentioned an important point. You have to avoid "wasting" when you take property back on occasion. You could not just open the gate and let the horses out. Boarding them was correct.
The land owner is trying to get his land back? I thought you said you were the owner? What did I miss?
He was referring to the connecticut land owner getting his land back@@BuddhaBeanie
Fictional story. You had a ranch lot or the owner had a lot? Why write tales like this?what purpose does it serve? Come up with proof now.
@@BuddhaBeanie He was referring to the land owner in the Steve Lehto video.
Would seem to me that possibly the LLC was formed for a fraudulent purpose, and that would expose the individuals involved, regardless of "Limited".
I would not be surprised to see the damages go much higher than 2 million, given how long it sounds like the plot had been growing. CT is a triple damages tree law state.
A friend of mine owned a few wooded acres in PA. His wife sold the property and banked the money in another person's account.
It would be triple damage for willful destruction for sure, this however would get a bit nuts. But at least 1 time tree costs up to 3 anyway.
The LLC is going to file for bankruptcy no matter what happens. The most this guy is going to get is a half built house.
@@2pugman that's called fraud. Did he have her charged before or after the divorce?
@@operator0 With a setup like this, I'd be fore tearing through the LLC and going after the people who set it up for the whole.
Land listing fraud is becoming a major issue throughout the country. It's going to be interesting how this is going to play out.
Nothing should be interesting about a case like this.
The house should be given to the land owner by the court!
The land owner shouldn't have to deal with this at all!
I’m Canada too. People are impersonating foreigners so that they can sell their vacant homes. In that case I’d like the buyers to be the owners
asymmetric encryption. Private key hand written on the deed. problem solved
@@vt20247 exactly you can't just go building on someone else's land , if you don't own the land you have no business selling it to anyone else and if that person you sold it to builds a house on it then you just gave a the actual landowner a free home, it's like buying a stolen car from someone, the car wasn't theirs to sell in the first place, a quick check on who is paying taxes on that land to the Local Govt would have cleared it up in a flash.
@@MotorsportsX Private keys are called private because they are kept private. You never write private keys down somewhere (like on contracts), instead, you write down the public key and say, only the one who posses the private key matching this public key can sell this property. Proof of ownership: Create a secret random number, encrypt it using the public key hand it over to the seller and ask him for the decrypted random number. If he can name it, he knows the private key and thus is the legitimate owner. All crypto currencies work like this btw.
Back in the 1980s had a neighbouring farmer in a similar situation. A guy build a house with half of the house on the farm property. Farmer ask to be paid for the land, but the land owner being a jerk donated the house to the Catholic Church. Once the Catholic Church saw what happened they returned the house to the donor. Farmer filed law suits, hime owner shit his pants and ended up selling the house to the farmer for pennies on the dollar.
So basically the church said: “yeah no we don’t want it and screw you for trying to drag us into this mess”
Was it intentionally built over the line or accident? I would have just paid the farmer if I liked my house
the same thing happened in NSW Australia where the surveyor surveyed the wrong block of land in a small village and the builder built a house on it. The owner of the land lived away and only went top his block of land a couple of times a year and when he say the house on his block he changed to locks and moved in. The courts upheld his claim to the house and the person who had the hose built sued the surveyor and won.
I love that "thanks for the free house!" move.
Also, in Australia, a new building estate in the small town I live in. The surveyors made a mistake.
OMG! My hubby is from Windsor and I’ve been to Oz 4x to visit family and friends. Home prices are crazy expensive. Wish someone would accidentally give us a house so we could move to Australia. We’re in America and have good jobs but we don’t make live in Australia money. In 2019 his mom sold her breeze block, 900 sq ft, 3bed-1 bath, 1960 home for $600,000 AUD. That much money would buy you a mansion where we live. She was able to move into a same sized retirement home in Port MacQuarie for the same money.
Im hoping you do a follow up on this Steve. Please let us know the outcome of this. Thank you Stve!
Sometime in the 1960's my great uncle and wife were on their way across the country and visited their parcel in Las Vegas. It had been between two casinos. But the casinos had been replaced by a much larger one and their land was right under the middle of the newer building. They got and accepted a cash offer on the spot for about 10 times what the parcel would have sold for, but less than it would have cost to remove the middle part of the building from their land.
The casino owners knew that was coming, and were prepared.
@@bruceschneider4928 at least the owners were compensated properly.
I would have made them restore the land just to stick it to them for operating like that.
@@andrewscharbarth2099 good way to wind up in a shallow grave in the desert.
Do you recall the casinos?
I have a friend that inherited some farmland. They had not been there for awhile and would only hunt on the property. They came back to plan for the hunt and when they arrived a few houses were built and a sub division was being built. Evidently local government members just took the land.
The only way the land could have been taken is if your friend had not paid the taxes on the land, usually for a couple of years. Government doesn’t usually get into the business of developing land, either. It sounds like a developer might have tried to pull a scam. I hope your friend didn’t let them get away with it!!! If they had paid all the taxes, they might be the new owners of some houses 😜
It is not true that “the only way…is if taxes weren’t paid..”
I can tell you for a fact, and would be delighted to provide the evidence, publicly, that local councils in Australia, using a loophole in the local government legislation, with the knowledge of such a loophole of the courts, and title office , have taken- imo stolen, land and other property from the lawful owners, without overdue taxes. It’s a big ponzi scam that enables local councils to hugely profit.
@@kristilbilyeu7682 you don't pay taxes on underdeveloped land stopfull
@@stuarthutton863 If you own land, you pay property taxes on it every year, even if there is nothing built on it.
@@stuarthutton863wrong
Criminal fraud is one of the things that can pierce the corporate shield, especially if it seems that the LLC was formed expressly to perpetuate the fraud. He should also look into tree law. Most of the new england states have quite ferocious penalties for people who illegally cut down trees on someone elses property. It is not just a simple theft question.
I was also thinking of the trees. It is worth having a photo taken every year.
I'm from Franklin vt, we had a year around place on lake Carmi but lots of people had summer camps we had too he over 100 year old maple trees on back of our property we left on vacation for two week came back two of our trees were gone. My father asked everyone Noone would cop to cutting them down so he call police and they figure it out pretty quickly let's just say the fines were crazy and my father ended up owning both camps on the other side. They settled by giving them beauty log cabin camps and 5 acres because they couldn't afford what they were forced to pay my father plus what they owed the town. Less than 1500 people live in that town still today.
The tree aspect was mentioned near the end of the video.
@@rathkopf I can't imagine that transplanting a bunch of full-grown trees to refill that lot would be cheap.
I was thinking the same. Seems unlikely the LLC did this intentionally otherwise why both with an LLC which doesn't cover your butt in the event of fraud.
I purchased a pickup truck in Arizona from a Canadian gentleman. He had lived here years back, purchased a piece of property, and left a few vehicles on it when he moved back to Canada when he lost his job. Fast forward 10 years and a neighbor called him asking why there was a crew clearing his lot. Turns out someone from Vietnam or the Philippines, I can't remember which, fraudulently sold his property to somebody who was going to build a house. He was able to get his property back and decided that it wasn't worth the risk to continue to hold a piece of property in another country so he sold the vehicles he had stored there and was going to put the property up for sale.
Just think about all the trouble this scammer had to go through to be able to do this. Finding property where the property owner doesn’t live nearby would be a feat in itself.
@@Pp7450-n5u Google street view reveals TOO much sometimes.
This scam almost happened in our office! The true owner called in and said, "what the heck" and it stopped everything. The scammers had fake ID's and all. It is so crazy what is happening these days. I double and triple check the owners of record and ask for DL to verify but, you can't even rely upon this anymore... If suspect you have to just drop it in the attorneys lap and pray they figure it out.
This has been blowing up in the news here in Connecticut for two days now. The true owner was given an offer to sell a few months before this happened. Definitely fishy.
Wow! That's nuts! So maybe the builder DID know who the true owner was! And they built on it anyway? That would be really dumb.
It takes time to get that house to its current building completion. I'm betting the builder found out that they got screwed big time and hoped they could aquire the property. They probably thought if the real owner decided to sell then problems solved. I wouldn't take a single offer until I found out how all this took place.
Land was worth 20k at the time undeveloped.
This stuff happens because everyone gets away with being lazy in our society. The attorney, title company, construction company, etc. No one can be bothered to conduct actual due diligence making it easy for scammers.
Maybe you aren’t aware how advanced scammers are these days. I’ve seen fraudulent notary stamps on original documents!
Yep, like I always told my real estate title searchers that I trained, garbage in, garbage out and it always falls back on the searcher.
A simple search into who was paying the damn taxes would have prevented this!
It has nothing to do with laziness
@@no_peace I think sometimes it might be. But I’m convinced this specific incident was pure fraud.
My neighbor once tried to log off my treeline. There are very strict laws invoving tree harvesting. I had a survey done. The trees were mine so I told the loggers to stop. They didn't want to get involved in a lawsuit so they left. My neighbor was so angry but powerless to do anything.
Such tree laws exist in other countries as well. In Denmark someone bought a house that was located by a large lake, (large for tiny nation Denmark that is). The house could have a fantistic look over the lake, if it was not for some 150-200 year old trees blocking the view. Trees that not only was not located on land belonging to his property, but was also owned by the municipality. The trees had a protected status certified by the authorities. In the everything is digital nation of Denmark, the owner only had to turn on the computer to see that the trees were not on his land, and they were protected. The house owner though had money and thought fuck it. I'll chop down those trees and just pay the fine.
He got severely fined by the court, and the court also demanded he restored those trees to the size and the height they previously had. Since such trees were not available anywhere in Denmark. He had to buy them in Sweden. Get them dug up and transported to Denmark and then planted them by the lake. If any of the trees did not grow propperly or later died, the owner would be held accountable, and must procure replacements. This was added as a land registry to the property. Meaning if he sold the property, the new owner would take over this responsibility. In other words his property potentially took a big devaluation.
Only an idiot cuts down trees on a shoreline in a cold country to get a nice view. Those trees stop ice in winter from climbing up the shore and taking out your buildings or stopping ice floes in the spring melt. I have seen it with my own eyes. Seiche winds taking out cottages and homes with lovely views and sparing the places that left the trees.
@@justinburch dk isn't exactly cold
There are more subtle ways to get rid of trees, such as a few copper nails, if you have some patience.
@TheDilweed No. He was fined for destroying something protected. The court history is quite clear on this matter in Denmark. Last year a guy paid a contractor to remove a sand dune at the beach that was blocking his "view" at the ocean. Both the contractor and the man was fined, but on top of the fine the man was ordered to rebuild the dune to its "previous" state. That means he could not just dump sand there and call it quit, but had to make sure the various plants that can grow in this nutrient poor soil, will actually grow there. If need be, the rebuilding demand could be repeated as many times as needed.
Suing the Danish court system!!!! That is not how the law works in Denmark.
It does have its fairness principle, so when the trees had been planted and thrived for a while, the man could apply for getting the land registry changed. The point of the order was to make sure he corrected his mistake, and could not just sell the property without informing a new owner of this responsibility.
@@bootmii98 They don't have winter?
How is this even possible? Do you know how difficult it is to be able to legally build a house on your own land? Lol. I can't imagine getting the permits to build on someone else's land.
Hysterical. This post should have 5000 likes.
Funny how everything goes smoother (including stealing someone else's land) when you have an inside connection in the government. I bet if you dig a little, there's some connection here to some government insider
It's amazing how much easier it is to do things when you don't concern yourself with laws.
So,... wouldn't it be nice if all this LANDOWNER had to do was wait for the govt to condemn this other building and demolish it for him because of lack of valid building permits??? Oh, wait... the govt seemingly only checks up on LAW ABIDING CITIZENS!
It's easy all you do is pay the bribe.
My Father bought a piece of property near the interstate, ten acres for non-payment of local property taxes...$102.00 in 1977. Four years later, we drove by, and there was a Holiday Inn on the property. The next day, he sent me at age 15, into the motel with the deed, asking for the manager. My Father was in a wheelchair as a result of WWII. Shock to the manager as a title search did not show the county sale. We settled in court....$220,000.
I recently inherited my parents properties...Discovered I own a property that the next door owner built half his home across the property line...Waiting for a response to my letter to the homeowner.
An attorney was involved in that crooked transaction. Had a proper title search been done and the correct owner contacted, the attorney would have done his/her job correctly. Considering that the transaction involved a part of the world known for running dishonest scams, the attorney was either dishonest or negligent due to his/her involvement with this crime.
I'm surprised this didn't involve someone from Nigeria!
Are you saying a lawyer was "dishonest"!!!!???
Love this channel. 22 more videos and I will be ready for the bar exam!
Happened to my dad too, lost 1.5 acre of a 25 acre property due to improper records keeping (not readily accessible to the public) so it was missed when researched- that the previous owner of the 25 acres had sold the 1.5 acre parcel to a mason for building a chimney on her home on the 25 acres. The previous owner was old and it is assumed she had simply forgotten about the transaction. She died shortly there after and shortly after that the old house burned down leaving only the chimney, where it stood for many years afterwards. My dad also purchased a piece of property in a small subdivision in Florida that was being individually developed by each homeowner but turned out be near worthless due to on going legal problems with the owner/sellers.
This happened to my parents in the 1960s. They had to restore it and remove the part of the house on their land, about 10 feet. I remember the judge wasn't happy about their ignoring the property line
Ignoring the property line is a different situation to buying the land from someone who didn't actually own it in the first place. The builder holds a title to the land, even if it ends up being invalidated.
@@phillipsusi1791 They didn't hold a valid title to the land. It was a pain for my folks to get fixed and to get the land repaired.
@@kirkmorrison6131 Yes, but in *this* case, the builder *does* hold title to the land. That was my point. That's a bit different from the neighbor building over the border.
Im confused. Your parents had to restore someone's land? Or someone had to restore their land?
@@thedirtprincess3293 No my parents had their land restored. The people had to remove a paved driveway and remove part of the house. Replace soil and trees
Tree law is expensive. If they cut down trees then they would have to take the hit demolishing the house and loosing all the material cost. Then they have to replace the trees. Not with cheap saplings, but with trees comparable in age and size of the trees that were there. And they have to make sure those trees don't die for a certain amount of years. It would be cheaper for the fake owners to turn over the house and all and get out of demolishing it. In fact, offer to finish the house for him.
*losing (not "loosing") all the material cost.
@@Eidolon1andOnly what kind of coomment is that? yoou understoood the coontext give the persoon a break. yoou gave me a good laugh thanks
@@mikehoncho8890 LOL
RUclips is crawling with grammar Nazis and spelling trolls. I agree with you about the house. Should be his choice if he wants the house as compensation or if he wants it removed and land restored.
@@mikehoncho8890 I'll go him one better: if you can count it you use the word number, if it's quantitative and uncountable you use the word amount: thus-they have to make sure those trees don't die for a certain number of years, undoubtedly by giving them adequate amounts of water.
Lady at work told me someone had put a mobile home on her land without asking. She told the occupants to move it off her land. They wouldn't. She told the company who owned the mobile home to move it. They wouldn't. She had someone dig a trench around that home. The occupants left. The owner of the mobile home likely wasn't being paid so they came to move the home but couldn't due to the trench. They contacted the land owner and asked how to move the home. She firmly told them "Build a bridge!" They left it.
My nieghbor sold her house last November. My new neighbors put up a fwnce in their backyard but it went about 15' onto my property. It was temporary, so I didnt say anything in the winter so his dogs had a place outside. This spring I walked over and introduced myself and showed him the survey stakes. He moved his fence.
They were hopeful you wouldn’t notice and if you did, you wouldn’t mind. No one just moves into a new neighborhood and plants a fence where they want it without knowing they could be violating boundary lines. I don’t think I’d be bringing them a welcome to the neighborhood pie.
@@Garden366 My next door neighbor built a wood stockade fence within inches of my long-established chain link fence which is (barely) on my side of the property line. This leaves no way for either property owner to get in to maintain and manage the weeds growing between the fences. I'm figuring it is the responsibility of the current property owner next door.
My fence was there before any of the past three owners of that property were born.
A socialist can sell a lot of things that they dont own...
We're still waiting for our neighbor to move her fence that is a few feet into ours all the way down to her back corner. We were the only neighbor who had a surveyor come for a small fenced in area on the side of our house. Both neighbors were on our property. The other one isn't a big deal at our back corner, but this other lady hasn't moved it yet.
I was wondering why you didn't speak about the potential repercussions for the local lawyer who was involed in the fraudulent sale. This individual was granted power of attorney for a theoretical individual (who is in another country). Would they not be liable for the 'sale'. They either knowingly engaged in fraud, or did not do their due diligence to verify who the owner was.
Or know enough about the law to know how to circumvent it.
The lawyer was running this. Guarantee it. The money never went to any dude in South Africa. It's all a paper veneer.
you would also think the lawyer would do due diligence to research the yard.
I doubt the attorney will be held accountable. There are probably laws that absolve them from any liability. I think that's why legal matters are written in a whole other language that you need a law degree, or at least have to have learned the language, to understand. I don't understand how contracts like a rental car contact is written in a language I don't understand, yet I'm expected to read it on the spot, understand it, and sign it, when I don't speak, or read, the language. I'm sure there's some law about that which holds me accountable. Almost all people sign these documents without reading, or understanding all the time. In my mind the whole farce is criminal.
@@MrCharlesEldredge It's all in English. If you have good reading comprehension, no legal document should daunt you.
If you don't understand the definitions of words ... Then it may be a problem.
Just like taxes. No mystery. If you can read, you can do taxes.
This is why they said learning English and its rules were important.
I have a coworker who had the issue with trees a few years ago. A neighbour hired a timber company to select cut the rear of the property which abuts my coworker. The timber company cut nearly 250 feet onto my coworkers property, removing 3 mature elms which were certified disease free by a provincial arbourist. This is still going through court.) Both properties are roughly 500 acres so neither my coworker or his neighbour noticed until the following year)
I find it hard to believe that you never mentioned a title company. I have bought many pieces of property and I alwais caution people to never, ever buy a piece of real estate without going through a title company. It's one of the dumbest mistakes you can make in purchasing real estate.
Thank you for the tip !
Got that right! Retired real estate title examiner/agent here and so many red flags here. Foresee Underwriters paying a huge claim out.
That's exactly what I thought but the article in the NYTs stated the title company would not cover this as it was a case of identity theft (sounds like BS to me). The article also said the rightful owner was contacted last year to see if he was interested in selling the lot for $350K which he turned down. Several months later the bogus sale occurs. There is more going on here.
Title companies still make errors, so ultimately up to the buyer's or sellers to make sure that the Title company has actually done what they are supposed to do. I've had it happen twice to me, in 45 years of buying and selling property.
@@ellythompson4055 Except that the buyer appears to be the lawyer who undertook the scam.
Listening to a radio show several years ago. A guy called in and said that he had returned to his hometown after about 30 years. The 300 acres he owned was covered with houses. Nice houses. The host of the show asked if he had any intention of doing anything with the property. No....but... Congratulations! You own a lot of houses, or you can have lots of money. The developer had just whipped up a deed so he could sell lots to peoplel.
Unless the state has adverse possession laws. In certain states, if you've occupied a piece of property for 20 years or more and no one contests it through those years, you can legally file a claim for the deed.
@@NegativeSum It was my understanding that many of the houses were less then 10 years old or younger.
@@NegativeSumonly if the taxes on that property are unpaid. If the owner pays yearly property taxes he doesn’t have to do anything else.
Thank you for covering this because buyer should be making sure it’s not someone else’s property.
If an LLC can leave no one responsible for such horrific actions, I really question why any LLCs should even exist!
When they have a dissolution like that, it's pretty good cause to pierce the corporate veil unless the whole thing was arranged with a secured creditor, such as a bank, getting all the assets. You can't play games with corporations like that, underfund them or dissolve them, to get out of your debts. I think Steve was suggesting they might commit fraud by cutting and running, because I can't think of a legal manner of just dissolving and running from debts without your personal assets being at risk.
The whole purpose of an LLC is to shield your personal liability
@@integr8er66 Of course it is. But you do not get to play games with it. If you underfund your LLC, do not treat it as a real corporation, but merely a shell to avoid liability, the courts will allow creditors and judgment creditors to pierce the corporate veil and go after your personal assets.
If the LLC owner walks away, the property owner will own the semi-finished house. Even if he had to put a few thousand into it, a semi-complete house isn't nothing.
A pain in the butt to have a house on your property you didn't design or want? Maybe. But it's certainly better than nothing.
@@MWiggins-m2g Good point. It's actually fairly easy to pierce the veil of an LLC. Members have a tendency to be careless with business transactions thinking they are completely shielded on a personal level. What they don't realize is that if one personal transaction is made through the LLC on their behalf it breaks the shield. An example of this is an LLC that I did the books for. The members ignored my advice to not charge personal items on the LLC credit card. They continued even after I explained the ramifications thinking it was nonsense. They were sued and audit revealed the transactions. Their personal assets were open to the settlement.
"Someone who does not own the property can't sell it."
Sure they can. Carvana has been doing it for several years! 😂
Just this past year, I was involved in a slightly similar situation, but as the bad guy. My daughter decided to replace (not repair) the serviceable fence that bounded her backyard. I removed approximately 200' of perfectly good fence and put up the new fence as directed. When I was installing the final picket, I somehow noticed the property flag thirty or so feet out toward the side street and felt something was just not what I expected to see. I checked as closely as I could being that the new fence was up and in place. It appeared to me that my daughter had positioned the new fence centered on the property line. And, that's what she had done.
One of the reasons that my daughter had replaced the original fence was for privacy so the new fence was taller than was the original fence. When the neighbor saw that difference, she and my daughter began something only slightly less than the Hatfield and McCoy feud. No shots were fired, but both sides seemed to relish their self-righteous anger.
I eventually convinced my daughter that by placing the posts on the property line as opposed to placing the fence totally within her own lot, she had given up her right to the fencing that was on the "Hatfield" side. Maw Hatfield would have been totally within her rights to walk out with an oscillating saw, sledgehammer, and a pry bar, and to remove anything that extended onto her property.
The end result was that I got to remove the new fence and build another fence that was completely inside my daughter's property.
Mistakes abounded in the entire situation, and all of them were made by us, McCoys.
Our first mistake was removing a perfectly good fence. Repair and replacement fall into totally separate categories. Our second and more critical mistake was moving the new fence the two inches inside Ma Hatfield's property.
the only thing that surprises me about this story is that an HOA was not involved lol
Lol but so true
Seriously!🤣🤣🤣🤣
Lmao
Haha 🏆
Not every house has an HOA? The property literally sat there for years growing a small forest, chances are that the property doesn’t belong to an HOA.
This is disgusting. Under no circumstances should anything happen *except* these scammers getting prison time and a complete loss on their little plan. No way this was an innocent mistake - there are tax records to show who was paying the taxes that back up the owner.
This is where their LLC's lawyer dropped the Ball. He never verified the Seller's Identification when purchasing the property.
Obviously, the title insurance companies were not on the ball.
I'd take it as hey, someone's building me a new house on my property, that's nice of them.
But do you really want a 4000 sq ft house with 5 bathrooms and 4 bedrooms to clean? Heck, I have a 1000 sq ft house and hate cleaning what little I'm happy in. How much does it cost to heat and cool something that size? And you can't have 4000 sq ft of empty, takes a lot of furniture to have a house like that and you're not gonna want second hands from Goodwill in a nice house like that. No thanks. I'd make him tear it down and put up a nice little bungalow for me to own.
@@binbashbuddy Rent out the house. Then it's the tenant's job to clean it. Or do AirBnB and hire a maid to clean. Many options.
@@SchemingGoldberg never would it let someone live in my house, horror stories everywhere about this.
For free
@@binbashbuddy -- PLUS, the property tax bills would be exorbitant.
A real estate agent told me of a situation where there was a beautiful piece of river front property that people built their beautiful cabin on. They thought they owned the property. Turns out the legal owner came to check his land and found a beautiful cabin. He got an eviction notice for the people who were living in the cabin they built on land they didn't own. Turns out the cabin builders owned the land across the road. They bought a mobile home to live in and had a view of the beautiful cabin they built and were evicted from.
About 60 years ago I knew a kid that his grandfather gave land on a stream in NH with a nice cabin on it. The cabin was built by someone that didn’t own the property so that was free.
Dang, that sucks
I would've moved the house
Our neighbors and I are having an issue like this now. A home owner at the bottom of the hill is trying to expand his property by having construction out the back of his land at the top of the hill.
He's trying to punch through someone else's property to a private road he doesn't own so he can build houses that will use it for access. He said his next step is to claim part of my land so he can widen the private road he doesn't own for the traffic to homes he's going to build.
During his leveling he's already removed boulders off of an adjacent property that will cause erosion problems to the hill they carved out.
He's gone as far as to call the police on us saying whites are trying to stop his project because he's hispanic.
Whats the update?
This kind of real estate fraud is a growth industry in the US. Often it's started by someone filing a bogus quitclaim deed in the county courthouse and starting the ball of title fraud rolling. A friend of mine who used to buy/rehab old houses once went to a house he owned and found a family living in it and insisting that they were renting it from some out of town owner. It took many months to get the title clear to the point where he could actually sell it.
Title insurance comes into play and the attorney who did the title search has some questions to answer. I'm thinking the title insurer is on the hook for the $300K+ in known losses and whatever the judge decides too. I'm wondering why the title search just didn't verify where the tax bill is going and getting paid from. Seems something shady is going on.
Not really. Most property bills can be automatically billed on the net. And anyway, it doesn't matter much. My stepmother tried to get property my dad had given us kids by our mother his ex-wife. We were all on the property as owners of record, and he had made other provisions for their kids. But we were all young and he paid the taxes, and seeing an opportunity, after he passed she continued to pay the taxes and when whatever the time limit was up she filed. We were all negligent in being so lackadaisical about the taxes for sure. But by the time we paid our lawyers we had to sell it all and didn't realize a dime, even though we prevailed.
@@susanohnhaus611 I'm sorry to hear that. I'm wondering why probate didn't take care of things to prevent that.
A title search would have shown that Daniel Kenigsberg held clear title to the parcel ... because he did. A title search wouldn't reveal that someone who was fraudulently presenting himself as Daniel Kenigsberg, was not in fact Daniel Kenigsberg.
" I'm wondering why the title search just didn't verify where the tax bill is going and getting paid from."
What would that prove? So they check with the tax office. The tax bills are being mailed to Daniel Kenigsberg at his address of record on Long Island, and they are being paid. That's not inconsistent with someone who is temporarily residing overseas (hypothetically say a 6 month temporary residence at a hospital in Johannesburg) and was having mail forwarded to him, or having someone in the US handle affairs like keeping taxes paid I've worked overseas, for periods longer than 6 months. I didn't switch my address on everything, I just had my mail forwarded.
Not in cases of fraud... Title Co. is off the hook. Only if it was THEIR mistake.
If you have land, you need to check on it at least once a year. Or, if you know someone local, have them keep an eye on it. Trust no one.
The fact I need to spend money to keep what own is a testament to the legal system and the people that work in it. Sometimes I hate this legal system.
sure does seem like the law is pretty much just a cludgy hammerstone used by the wealthy and powerful in order to grind down the peasantry
Hawkmoon, the alternative would be a system where, instead of paying legal fees to protect your property rights, you and your family simply stand armed guard 24/7 to defend it against thieves.
That’s how it was before there were surveys and recorded deeds and titles and laws against theft. You think you would like that better? Build fortifications and a moat and be ready to fight off invaders? So when someone with a stronger or better armed group came along, your property became theirs, and you became dead.
@@mikewatkins7618 Moats and castles? What are you even talking about? I was simply suggesting we not have to go bankrupt to defend what is ours. Right or wrong when you’re bank account hits Zero you lose.
@Hawkmoon26933 do tell what legal system you prefer. There are no systems that I know of where legal actions are without cost.
I despise it because I'm one of its many victims...
This nearly identical situation happened to me in 1984 in Southboro, MA.
I owned 3 -1acre lots on a quiet country road. I built and sold the first home and started building the second of three planned homes.
I got hurt on the job and needed to take a break from the completion of the 3 home project.
I took 4 months off and when I went to the remaining lots to meet the civil engineer who had planned on marking the excavation boundaries. When I got there the wooded lot no longer had any trees on it. There were 200 yr old oaks on the property that were 36” around at the base and 125-175 feet tall. They were ALL GONE and to make matters worse the entire half of the property had an enormous pile of construction debris on it. I picked through that pile for many days looking for anything that could identify what this pile used to be and from where. I found an old notebook tracing it to a building that used to be owned by the Hospital in Framingham. I saw it being torn down but never dreamed it would end up on my property as a pile of trash. Well I ended up on the front page of the paper. It said I HAD DUMPED THIS MESS ON MY OWN PROPERTY. Cmon who would do that? I tracked down the demolition permit on file and traced it to the people that dumped this debris. It cost me @25k in legal fees and over 100k in bank fees from my construction loan. The trucking company when given an ultimatum by my lawyers just Filed Bankruptcy. I got NOTHING from them. I even sued the hospital because it was their trash. But they had a Team of attorneys that made my life a miserable hell. Total cost out of pocket to clean the site , legal fees and interest payments to the bank during this clusterfuck,
$164,677.23
Because of their dishonesty and scumbag ways of doing business I lost my shirt on the remaining project. I built the two houses left to do, I sold them at a loss because the market changed drastically in the year it took to straighten up the mess.
ALWAYS keep a keen eye on any property you own. Visit OFTEN and post NO TRESPASSING signs everywhere!!
Sorry that happened but I know what it’s like.
It SUCKS!!!
✌️🇺🇸😎✌️🇺🇸😎
oh man, that story hurt to read. So sorry.
Sorry that happened to you. That is outrageous
I just recently bought my grandparents house off my parents after my grandparents recently passed away. I couldn’t even imagine somebody being like “well Your options are just take the money for what the house is worth and you’re all good” like that would make it OK.
It's reprehensible. If they have the money for fines they can just do whatever half the time
Thank you for your time. Very interesting subject matter.
Updated surveys need to be done before buying property or building. He should get his land back and the house as remedy for the damages
The survey was not an element in this case. What I wonder is did the builder have title insurance.
There was a surveyor in Florida about 11 years ago who signed off on the work and marked the lot that was going to be built on inside a community, only for it to be discovered a while after the massive house was built, that he had flagged the neighboring lot from the one the homeowners actually owned. The homeowners had to not only exchange titles with the other owner, but pay the other person about $45000 extra as the lot they actually had owned was somewhat smaller due to a cliff in one corner.
And the error was only discovered when another surveyor who was marking for another lot, noticed that there was a house on the wrong lot.
I don't think there was any issue on the property lines. Someone obtained legal title to the property by fraudulent means.
@@kleverich You are right but often it is the next door neighbor encroaching with a fence or building so a survey will protect. AND, if the owner did have a survey on that parcel done before or even after the purchase it was another solid piece of evidence he WAS the correct owner. Not many will pay for a survey of property they do not own.
50 years a ago I was in a car with my Grandpa and he checked some raw land he own and saw a new house (inexpensive house) built on or near Grandpa's land. Rural area, few houses around. Sure enough 1/2 the house was on Grandpa's land. Owner just didn't check property lines correctly. Grandpa negotiated a deal.
This happens all the time. Once I bought an empty lot from a friend. A few months later I drive by and see a for sale sign in the yard! Some scammer was selling land they didn't own to unsuspecting victims. I removed the sign and reported it to the police. Nothing ever happened after that.
And one other time I personally bought a property that had an old abandoned house on it. I arrived to find the house had been demolished by the city 7 days prior due to it looking abandoned. The scammer owned the property and when they realized the city demolished the house they quickly offloaded the property on me not mentioning the house was gone. Even without the house the land was still worth more than I payed. But the new owner (me) is legally required to pay the city $13k for the cost of the demolition. I only paid $3800 and the property was worth $8k. So I had to simply abandon it letting it recycle back into the city's tax auctions.
Imagine the bigger nightmare if a family was already living there!
It’s not that bad. You’ve got second amendment solutions if the civil courts are too slow.
@@EnthalpyAndEntropy Murdering people who unknowingly purchased something you own from a fraudster isn't a fix, it's evil.
@JollyGiant19 Yes, justice isn't carried out with guns, how foolish
@@EnthalpyAndEntropy And you would get three squares and a bunk for FREE! And your roomie would have cool stories about life as a mafia hit man.
@@AnthonyJMendoza-f7i not really. If it’s my property I have every right to kick in my front door and if someone places me in fear of grave bodily harm, too bad for them.
I hear a lot about "Home Title Theft." If someone forges your name and takes loans against your property, how can you be responsible for those loans?
By proving that it wasn't you. It is literally an Identity Theft case.
You will be responsible if you did something, or omitted to do something that made it easy for the forgery to occur.
There are also scammers who *claim* to own property that has been properly bought and sold. family member of mine bought a house. A year or two later, a letter arrives. The sender claims to be owner of part of the land on which this house/yard are sitting, but he's happy to sell for $10,000.
My family member forwarded the information to their title insurance and also to local police, who were already investigating the perpetrator for engaging in this fraud scheme with a lot of nearby property owners.
@@julianbrelsford. Interesting.
@@sandyfoot Nope. Forgery is forgery. Where do you people get your skewed information?
My old neighbor built his driveway on our current property. We didn't do a land survey until our old neighbor sold the property and we had some disputes with the new owners. I then hired an attorney that told us that if the driveway was built on our land over thirteen years ago, we have lost our land. We found out that in almost each of the 50 states, if somebody takes possession of a piece of land for 13 years (the time varies state to state) they become the owner. To top it all off we pay taxes for it!
And cops usually won't do anything about it either, so you don't have any protection.
It's called adverse possession. A friend of mine's parents lost 10 acres to a neighbor because he "volunteered" to bushhog it for 10+ years. After the 10 years were up, he legally claimed ownership of the property...
@@hoosierplowboy5299 that should be illegal
My great grandfather was a county judge back in the 1800s. One afternoon the city came through and ripped out trees along to road to widen and pave it, without the consent of the landowners. His property was one of those affected. The city had to pay everyone on the street for each tree.
Hearing so much about scammers using LLCs to conduct business, I'd like to hear some discussion of whether there needs to be more scrutiny, regulation, or even a reduction in the protection afforded with LLCs.
On Long Island when they widern a major rd town just takes your land and building or offer very little money. Then charge very high tax to the public.
So if they put it under an S corp or C corp.....same thing can happen. Anyone can be a scammer using any number of business entities. The LLC just happens to be the easiest one to set up. Stripping protections there only hurts legitimate small businesses.
Steve, I took L101 and L102 as part of my business degree back in 1989 - it helps me still till this day. Your videos remind me of days and the important lessons. Thanks for all you do. Great job.
This one really upset me. He probably played in that vacant yard as a kid and cared for those individual trees. It's a bit like killing somebody's pet. You just can't set a cash value on it.
Unfortunately in most states pets are legally valued the same as livestock. They have no real value by criminal law. You have to go to civil court for that.
i hope we will see an uppdate to this one when the case is done, it was quite a intersting one also keep up the good work Steve :)
Great video Steve, please keep us informed as to the end result. Thanks
Depending upon how it plays out, I'd assume that there might be a way to bypass the issues with the LLC if it's created for this if it's connected to the fraud getting the land.
Good point. The LLC might very well be a part of the scam. That thought crossed my mind at the start of the video. Perhaps set up with an LLC to avoid liability if they are discovered. As Steve mentioned they could abandon the LLC. It is kind of odd that this particular property was purchased by multiple people using an LLC. Potentially sketchy.
Wouldn’t the property taxes still be being paid by the real owner. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to get some kind of communication to the real owner through town records
Good point
Now the taxes would be much greater with the house built on the land.
What does he do about that?
I wonder what it would cost to move the house.
It sounds like the owner and the fake seller of the land have similar names.
@@B_Bodziak yes but when you pay your property taxes there is usually if you pay with check another address associated with the check when it’s mailed. if it’s credit depending on how each town does it your info would have up to date with the town.
@@mballer in Connecticut oh definitely
update on this case from CT Insider dated 1/03/2024. Everyone involved is suing each other. FBI also involved, linking it to a similar scam in Rhode Island, with money funneled to a Florida account. The Developers claim they were scammed, and they are suing the attorney that represents them AND the attorney who represented the selling company, a real estate firm. The legal owner of the property has filed another suit in CT court, under another statute (unfair trade practices?) seeking to increase damages.
In 2001 my friend's dad passed and he left him a little under an acre in the michigan and Trumbull area. It appraised for a couple thousand in 2002. A couple years ago it was appraised for a little under 2 million. He couldnt sell fast enough
I had someone say they had power of attorney over an estranged relative who my mother gave property to before she died. They opened probate on my mother added this persons name as an heir to my mothers estate. They listed assets that belonged to me into this probate case. I hired an attorney that told me she resolved the matter, then when I went to sell my property the title company emailed me and said I had to go to court because the case was still open. My attorney disappeared after closing her firm 4 years prior to when I tried to sell the property. The perpetrators knew my attorney disappeared, perhaps paid her to disappear, not sure. The perpetrators hired an attorney who transferred the title from my mother and myself into the name of that estranged relatives name, they said the perpetrator bought a note against the property and added their name to the title as well. Then they closed probate, and opened another case. The new case was a partition and a foreclosure suit filed against me. The court gave them the property, they filed a deed signed electronically for my and the estranged relatives signatures claiming they sold the property. The court paid the perpetrators fraudulent "Note "" and his attorney fees at closing. They paid claims for debts 10 years after my mother died out of my homestead property. Then the same attorney for the perpetrators (with fake POA ) he was then paid a second time 10 months after closing of this sale of my home. He filed another claim for attorney fees for representing the estranged relative, who mind you never met this attorney or signed any POA. No one stopped the fraudsters no matter who I called. Florida courts only speak to or hear from attorneys ? They ignore pro se property owners? They notified me of hearings , if I tried to speak to or in front of the judge at these hearings they cut me off. I Then I would be muted till end of hearing. Later Id be muted upon entering the meeting , and eventually stopped notifying me of the hearings entirely. Seems to be an elaborate scheme carried out through use of technology because I never once saw anyone in person. The court house employees were not helpful when I would go to talk about this matter. It seriously felt like we are under marshall law throughout the experience. Police never answer the phone for non emergency, the emergency line works, but when they come they dont file a report or investigate . Local government must be corrupt AF in this county. What a shit show. Glad your friend could sell his home. ANy good attorneys out there brave enough to investigate public corruption please reach out.
"tree law" - Looking on Google maps, the plot is nicely wooded, and now completey cleared - so thats a lot of mature trees which need replacing, plus the timber costs of the removed wood.
I grew up in UP! Most of my family still there. Nice to see a yooper on here!
This story is so odd. Even vacant land has a parcel number ( lot & block ) attached to it. The owner of the property is listed as well. It's public record and not hard to find. How does anyone complete real estate transactions without a title company? 🤔🧐
The owner being listed is why this whole scam was possible. They had his name and just made-up the rest.
The general idea is that the LLC doesn't WANT to do due diligence. If they can get the house built and sold, pocket the money, then disband the LLC it becomes exceptionally difficult for anyone to actually hold them liable for their actions. The whole point of having an LLC for this is so that any money it makes can be handed to the owners, but the owners personal assets are protected from any creditors (including most court judgements). So even if this guy wins, he gets his property back, but it's near impossible that he'll ever be paid for the damages.
@@nodak81 I understand that, but the owner's address is also listed. They don't just put a name on the property. They also show where the tax bills are mailed to. They go to the actual property owner, unless they have a mortgage.
@jool7793 Really? I didn't know that. Well then who warrants the deed to the property?
Happens everyday
Worked with a guy who inherited land from an uncle. There were two houses on the lot, one was his uncles and the other was free. A builder built one on the wrong side of the plot line after his uncle had gone to the nursing home. It was a mistake, this guy at work didn’t want the lot, and sold it with both houses on it. I don’t remember the final outcome but it was a mess.
Very interesting video. I don't know you, Steve Lehto, but I wish I did. I agree with your points. I retired from the Army in 1989 and moved to Mississippi because my spouse's father split his 120-acre rural property among his three children. We became property owners of a 40-acre plot. Many years before that my father-in-law installed a road culvert on the outside edge of the property. As neighbors sometimes do, he allowed the property owner to use it to cross the road ROW ditch into his neighbor's land, also. Time marches on... After a tour of 2 years in Korea and my Army retirement my wife and I built a house on the property.
A few years later the neighbor erected a three-strand barbed wire fence that encroached onto my property and sectioned off the driveway culvert onto his property. In other words, he didn't erect the fence on the property line. He also installed a locked metal gate. When I approached his child who inherited the property after his death to dispute the fence location that fellow declared "Eminent Domain" laws made the property his. Of course, it traveled many hundreds of feet down the property line. He planted pine tree saplings after erecting the fence, also.
I know quite a bit about criminal law, but really enjoy Steve explaining various civil and case laws, which are foreign to me, but of great interest. 😎
That happened to the property my brother bought. The previous owner built a garage next to his house. After it was done the property owner showed up and had his property surveyed and the garage was on his property. He did give the homeowner his costs back, but put permanent stakes on all his properties.
I was owned a lot next to my home. Two years after I purchased it the same lawyer who closed the sale to me also closed a sale to another person. You would think that this lawyer might have been aware of the title in my name. The second sale was voided and this lawyer later became the mayor of our town.
Something similar happened to an acquaintance of mine. The acquaintance bought a run down house that hadn't been lived in in years, apparently halfway through a renovation. After my acquaintance got halfway through her own renovations she was notified by the police that she had been scammed because the the person who sold the house to her didn't own it. It was discovered because the scammers had scammed other people the same way, by finding pieces of property that appeared to be abandoned and then "selling" them. The title insurance company reimbursed her for the cost of the purchase, but not sure about the improvements. The actual owner got a new roof and some other improvements, so probably wasn't complaining.
Heard about this happening a lot in Chicago
Check to see if that lawyer who had the POA also set up the LLC? Could be some jail time involved!
Update, they stopped construction on the house! That case, in state Superior Court in Stamford, and Kenigsberg's federal case in New Haven (moved from Hartford) are both pending. Talks toward a settlement have yielded no results so far but more sessions are scheduled in January. Both cases have numerous motions flying about in which parties are seeking to lessen their liability
Even if the LLC pulls the plug and disappears, the court can still award the property owner clear title to the house, thereby giving him something of value ("Thanks for the free house, guys!") and depriving the LLC of its "investment." Any way you slice it, these crooks should not be rewarded.
I don't think the LLC is the crook here. It seems like the LLC bought the property (or believed they brought the property) from someone fraudulently claiming to be the owner. Even the owner's attorney says it doesn't appear the LLC was a part of the scam.
and where does the lending bank come into this
@@alanm2842 Whatever the pecking order turns out to be, the legitimate property owner should be at the top (after Uncle Sam, of course, but good luck fighting that). And a purported U.S.owner who lives in South Africa should be a major warning flag.
@@alanm2842 I'm guessing that the lending bank, if there is one, is in as bad a position as the LLC. Generally, the Bank secures it's loan with an ownership interest in the property (deed of trust or mortgage) granted by the purchaser, but in this case the LLC didn't own the property, so couldn't have granted the bank any interest. So the bank's loan is unsecured. So, if the LLC becomes insolvent as a result of this mess (very likely) then the bank will be fighting over scraps, along with the builders subcontractors and the building suppliers, instead of foreclosing and recovering the outstanding loan.
@@andrewalexander9492 Uh...if the bank issued a traditional construction loan, it should have title insurance (to protect the lender, not the builder nor eventual homeowner). I think that's industry standard (certainly is in Florida and California).
The party who purchased the parcel (should) have purchased and paid for title insurance. Depending on the limits of that policy, they (title insurance company) would be on the hook for the value of the land. As for the construction loan, secured by the new structure, I'd be curious about a similar policy and/or coverage (and what parties are covered). Will stay tuned for a follow up. Thanks Steve!
Yep depending on creditor arrangement, the LLC may have very little monetary investment and can walk away with a profit leaving everyone else holding the bag. Sounds like what an entitled karen gov official would do with their lawyer.
If they paid with cash title insurance, and loans are not applicable
@@clayed3311 If you pay outright, you certainly aren't required to have title insurance, but it might make eminent sense to have it.
I seriously doubt that there is anyone involved, other than the LLC/scammer. They probably didn't actually get far enough into the scam to get an actual buyer.
@@clayed3311 Even if a buyer were to pay cash, then it would still need to go into an escrow account to be held until the close of sale. If it were on the up and up. All the same, the local and state laws may still require that a record of title search and/or insurance and homeowner's insurance is still in place and part of the conveyance deed before the deed can convey. It all depends on the law. What idiot is going to fork over cash for a property or a million dollar house without some guarantee of legitimacy? I think this is just a scam that got nipped in the bud.
Tax bills were sent out and paid, this is public info. All this could be checked on line, to see the owner of the property. The llc was trying to pull a fast one.
In NB Canada, all real estate transactions have to be done with government issued photo ID. The lawyers have to have copies and have to see you in person or on camera. Also, all properties have their surveys registered with gps coordinates. Makes for fewer boundary disputes.
Good on New Brunswick. Especially with the last few years with a population from western Canada moving there.
There were a lot--probably the majority--of residential surveys completed in the USA that predate gps. Also, if (for example) a title company were to provide title insurance, that insurance would probably also cover any "liens, encumbrances or defects in the title." Lots of moving parts in property ownership: not just identity and boundaries.
Even stricter here in Germany - real estate deals have to be officiated by a registered notary, who checks the IDs of everyone involved, makes sure everyone taking part actually comprehends what is about to take place and does due diligence for a couple of weeks. Only after that you're cleared to pay for the purchase. The whole process costs an arm and a leg, but this kind of fraud is much less prevalent as a result.
It's the same in Alberta. Lawyers have to see you in person and need two forms of ID.
They aren't GPS coordinates, as those can change, regularly. What they are registered with, is a METES and BOUNDS legal description. That can even include landmarks, unique to the land. Go onto google and query a 'metes and bounds' legal description example.
I sold my house last year. Not once did it involve a pen and paper signature. Heck, I could've just used a computer typing my name but insisted to use something at least close to my John Hancock but made with a mouse.
It's way too easy these days. With all the tech we have, selling a house should involve fingerprints, videos... it's the most important asset most people ever own, and they swung open the door for this sort of fraud.
Electronic signatures are legal. Your identity would have been verified beforehand. It just eases the burden of having hand signatures, especially if there are multiple offers, counter-offers, addendums, etc. Otherwise, you may as well just camp out at the REALTOR's/attorney's office. It is a matter of convenience, AFTER you've already proven your identity and right to convey the property.
In Arizona, they show the actual deed paperwork WITH legal signatures online for ANYONE to see. It helps with honest research, but also helps out the fraudsters.
@@paulas_lens No, they don't.
Docusign is just typing on a keyboard.
@@shelleythompson-brock6412who is proving that the person affixing the digital signature is actually the person verified?
This is a scam that has been going on fo years. Companies are selling a service that protects land owners from being scammed out of their land or homes. It is really quite easy to take over deeds. The ease at which people can take a persons identity for these types of scams have made incidents like these almost commonplace. You are absolutely correct. the person should get clear title to the property he already had clear title to. Only if he is willing to make a deal with these people. , who are probably well aware of their trespass, should the house remain.
"A judgement against an LLC...is a piece of paper against a piece of paper." I love that
On this side of the world, a judgement against a company can be the court-appointed sheriffs against any and all assets belonging to the company. As in, they can seize enough assets to cover the debt plus court and collection costs.
@@melkiorwiseman5234 A judgement forfeiture and seizure can only be enforced by the jurisdictional authority. Good luck with enforcement of that in another country. Its hard enough to get intrastate and interstate authorities to cooperate.
@@shelleythompson-brock6412 I know it's either not possible or a horribly complicated matter across countries. However in my country, cross-state jurisdiction probably wouldn't be a problem. If you know that the person you have a claim against is in a different state (which you should, since you wouldn't get a debt judgement otherwise), you just choose the High Court in that state to execute the judgement.
It's basically a 2-step process. Go to local court and have a hearing where you present your case for a "judgement debt" and the other party (if they decide to) can argue why they shouldn't have to pay.
If they're ordered to pay but don't, you can then ask to transfer the matter to the High Court for collection. Once that's done, the local sheriff does the rest.
@@melkiorwiseman5234 I'm in the US, and its only US legalities that I address. As I've already stated, there may/may not be intrastate/interstate cooperation. It depends on the situation and the degree of criminality committed by that person. A person or other entity can own property or other assets in a multitude of locations. Those assets/properties could be part of indelible trusts, or a plethora of other reasons why they're protected from forfeiture or seizure. There are a number of reasons why a Judgement is just 'a piece of paper against a piece of paper', as Steve mentioned. I've had judgements issued against others, and it doesn't guarantee that you'll receive one red cent. It only shows a legal right to that compensation. It doesn't enforce payment. By garnishment, with-holding, or any other means. It certainly doesn't warrant or guarantee that law enforcement will use their resources to act as a debt collector for you, nonetheless, chase someone down beyond jurisdictions. Its just not the way that the real world works. Nice dream, though.
@@shelleythompson-brock6412 Just one more reason to be glad that I don't live under USA law.
Isn’t this the kind of situation that title insurance is supposed to cover? I wonder why that was not discussed.
Also, if property taxes were regularly paid on the lot, the address of the payer ought to have been in the public record.
You don't have to have title insurance unless you have a mortgage.
@@B_Bodziak That’s the point. If the LLC paid for title insurance, the title company would be on the hood, not them for the value of the land at a minimum.
Yes this is exactly what title insurance covers. If the LLC got an owners policy then the insurer pays out policy limits for full failure of title. If they didn’t then that is probably the worst decision they ever made
Whoever is providing the construction loan is probably scrambling trying to play CYA. Builders insurance agent is looking for loopholes to deny coverage !
@@B_Bodziak That depends on law. Many states require that a title search be performed and insured before a conveyance is recorded and legalized. In fact, I can't think of a single state that doesn't require it, even on a quit-claim deal.
I owned a taxed vacant property lot for like 10 years and one day found it was developed into a parking lot. The police would not support my claim stating it was civil not criminal. I found out that the person using it had rented property adjacent to mine and confused the location. I their view they had full rights to my property. As it turned out they had rented what was adjacent to my property from the department of transportation who told me there was nothing they could do about it because they didn't tell the renter to develop my land. I informed the two DOT representatives in a meeting that I would sue the DOT, the state, and both of them as they had signed the rental agreement for lack of use of my property and would be looking to recoup a substantial dollar amount for that loss of use as well as all previous rental income they had received with interest. They left the meeting and returned in 5 minutes stating they would inform the tenant that their rental agreement was now voided and that they were illegally using my land which they must immediately vacate.