Hello All,
A relative of mine is in a bad situation, in that the home he owns has been mortgaged by an imposter pretending to be him. The money borrowed by the fraudster is gone, and he is left with the mortgage.
Legal action has been taken, in that his solicitor has put a caveat on the property, and sent letters to Land Title Office, Bank, Police, Bank’s solicitor.
The details on how the fraudster managed to pull this off is not fully known at the moment. The solicitor did manage to get a copy of the mortage with the fraudster’s signature, which is totally different to the owner of the property.
At the moment, nobody’s sure how they are going to catch the fraudster, but that is not important to the property owner. All he wants is to keep his house, and not let the situation end with the bank selling off the house for the mortgage.
The solicitor has mentioned that it is going to take some time, and probably needs to invoke claim for compensation from the Torrens Assurance Fund by either the bank or the property owner. I’m not too sure what this fund is, what the requirements are to get compensation, and what level of compensation is available.
If anyone have any thoughts on this matter that would help, I would be very grateful.
Thanks
JG
This should be a case of the bank being sure of the title holder being correct. This is their problem for not taking full due diligence. This is the same as someone taking your cheque book and writing out cheques, which the bank honours – very few cheques these days are examined for correct signature – the banks decided that the number of frauds detected wasn’t worth the time, and therefore cost, involved in having someone verify all signatures to all cheques.
Your relative’s solicitor should be talking of suing the bank for the costs involved in their not performing due diligence. I can imagine that he has suffered enormous emotional worry from this.
Pls – tell us which bank????
My contribution to the which bank query elsewhere on this forum is the situation which happened to us this last week. We had confirmed settlement for wed last week, which was delayed from wed to thurs then fri, with a definite ??? for monday – delayed till a definite wed- then papers received, but lo and behold, they had discharged the mortgage on our ppor not our ip!!! so it was definitely thurs now….but the adelaide bank finally came thru on friday – the day my a/c went od- $50 ref fee they are going to have to reimburse me, and $110 late settlement fee they are going to have to reimburse our purchaser – not from us, but from another deal they were waiting to settle at the same time as our purchase!
Guess who we won’t be using again?[
]Hi Hilary,
In an ideal world the people who is wronged always gets justice in the courts. However, taking it to the courts would be the last resort, since who knows with the banks resources they could somehow turn the case around or delay the case until my relative runs out of money for legal fees.
There needs to be a way of settling this outside of court. Since the money is gone, someone has to come up with the money, and hopefully it’s not through selling the house.
Thanks
JG
Totally understand what you are saying.
BUT banks don’t like bad press, so maybe this is a case for A Current Affair.
Either way, pls let us know which bank did this, because I am sure none of us on this forum want to deal with such an inept company.As a mortgage broker myself, I know the bank has a duty of care to fully indentify by way of documentation i.e passport, drivers licence etc anyone trying to borrow money or take out a mortgage.
I would suggest the bank is at total fault here and your freind shouldn’t have too much to worry about. I would hope thier solicitor as already taken this path of action and bought to the banks attention that they were NEGLIGENT in thier role
Good luck
I actually spoke to my solicitor about this, as I was in the middle of a land purchase from a private sale and felt there might be something to worry about. She said that this is worrying, because there is a lot of it happening at the moment[
][!]. It appears that the ‘owner’ has fake id to prove they are the one’s on the title.
Please everyone, get your solicitor to make sure before you commit.mmmay1 could u send me your email adress?
sorry mmmay1, my email adress is [email protected]
]
!]. It appears that the ‘owner’ has fake id to prove they are the one’s on the title.The topic ‘Mortgage Fraud’ is closed to new replies.
