It is every homeowner’s worst nightmare. You are at your front door, put the key in the lock, and it won’t open. Through the window you see someone has replaced your possessions with their own. They then inform you that the single largest purchase you have made in your life is now officially theirs.
Just a nightmare? The Revd Mike Hall was wide awake on August 21 when he drove from where he had been working in North Wales to the terraced house he had owned in Luton for 31 years, and believed he still owned, only to be locked out and told he was trespassing by a man claiming to be the new owner’s father.
It was a shocking way for him to learn that the same fraudsters and criminal gangs who stalk us online and on the phone are opening up a new front: targeting our bricks and mortar. Worse still, when he reported the theft of his home to the police, they informed him it was a civil matter, to do with the Land Registry, and not a crime, so there was nothing they could do to help.
“To be told by the police that they didn’t believe a criminal offence had been committed was just unbelievable,” Hall reflects. The whole ordeal has caused him to doubt himself. “I keep asking myself, what have I done wrong?”
It took the intervention of BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme to persuade the Bedfordshire fraud squad that being scammed out of the ownership of a house valued at £200,000 was a serious criminal matter. It is now being investigated.
Hall had bought the house when he left university. In recent years, though, he had been working in Wales, so had been renting it out. With the Covid lockdown, though, the property had been empty for some time. That made it very attractive to scammers. Luckily, neighbours alerted him in the summer that people were in there.
The first person Hall met was a builder pulling out the kitchen and bathroom and putting in new wiring for the new owner. His father was summoned and together they checked with the Land Registry, the government department that records ownership of property in England and Wales. It said the house had been sold by one Mike Hall the previous month.
Only it wasn’t the real Hall, but a scammer pretending to be him.
The swindle was sophisticated. First the scammer had ordered a duplicate driving licence in Hall’s name from the DVLA, to be posted to the address they had on record – the empty Luton property. Then he managed to change the picture on it. Though both middle-aged, Hall is white, his scammer black.
With this key official document in his possession, the fraudster was able to convince TSB to open a bank account for him in the name of Mike Hall into which he received the funds the new owners paid for the property. The licence was also sufficient to persuade a solicitor to do the legal work on the transfer of ownership.
So far this “vendor fraud” seems to have gone unchallenged, and there is a suggestion that the gang behind it may have been involved in other scams. There were nevertheless moments, suggests Lee Shrimpton of the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA), when alarm bells might have rung.
For example, the bank account was little used apart from that one large transfer, a tell-tale warning sign of money laundering, according to guidelines published for financial institutions as recently as 2019.
The fact that the house was sold for £131,000, against an estate agents’ valuation of £200,000, might also have raised eyebrows. In an overheating market, why would any buyer take such a low price unless they wanted to avoid a mortgage company looking into the purchase too closely?
Meanwhile the DVLA, it turns out, had had concerns about the request for a duplicate licence, to the point of contacting Hall in April and asking if he had ordered it. He told them no, but they then took no follow-up action.
As regards the solicitors involved, Shrimpton says, there was no such obvious flaw, but Covid may have curtailed what are usually face-to-face meetings to check the driving licence and certify identity; in some instances replaced by Zoom gatherings.
Challenged on its part in this crime, the Land Registry point to their reliance on professional conveyancers to spot fraudulent documentation, but add that “despite our efforts, every year we do register a very small number of fraudulent transactions”.
A spokesman says: “Our specialist counter fraud teams focus on detection, prevention and education, working with professional conveyancers, such as solicitors, who are required to make checks to prevent fraud and money laundering.
“We are actively encouraging conveyancers to use digital cryptographic ID checking as a more secure means of identifying people.”
The registry has, it says, paid out £3.5 million in compensation in such cases in the past 12 months, up 40 per cent on the previous year. Hall may get his compensation via this route, but the house, once registered, belongs to the new purchaser.
This case is clearly not a one-off. “Anyone who owns or is in the process of buying a home could potentially be targeted by scams,” is the stark warning from the Home Owners’ Alliance. But some, it seems, are more at risk than others.
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