Originally Posted by
Mark in Ottawa
There was a scam going on in Canada a few years ago where fraudsters would search property titles looking for houses that had no mortgage. They would then steal or create identity documents allowing them to pass as the property owner. This would be followed by an application to the bank for a large mortgage after which the thieves would transfer the funds offshore. There were a few very upsetting aspects to this. In several cases, the thieves were from Africa (Nigeria as I recall) and took on names that could not reasonably be presumed to be theirs and got the mortgage without the banks making an effort to check their identity. That was followed by the banks going to court to get the (victim) owners to pay the mortgage. The scam came to a stop when the government told the banks to eat the loss themselves and real estate lawyers and banks started to get very serious about checking the identities of anybody involved in a real estate transaction.