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1. Author lost me at his first sentence: "Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life." I am careful and aware of this possibility, b

1. Author lost me at his first sentence: "Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life." I am careful and aware of this possibility, but AFAIK I have not experienced this, nor have "most people" I know. o_O Crazy times. 2. I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere? i.e. Torrens-style

x0x0 8mo ago
They're not trying to transfer ownership. They're trying to scam people out of the earnest money before a title search (ie ownership verification) happens. Titles are very decentralized; they are likely modestly-competently managed at the county level, of which there up to 254 per state (Texas). And identity theft is also very easy in the US. It happened to an old in my family. The state dmv happily mailed a replacement license to a completely different state without so much as checking with the person whose license it is. Just for the asking. It's absurd.
jjmarr 8mo ago
Unlike most common law jurisdictions, the United States doesn't have a central land registry due to lobbying from the title insurance industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#United_States
- nine_k 8mo ago
  I wonder why a commercial entity that registers ownership / titles for free, and bills for checking, did not spring up. Clearly there is moneyed demand for certainty about title rights, and if you can provide certainty (because the last deal was registered with you), it may be a more desirable product than mere insurance.
  - wrs 8mo ago
    It’s turtles all the way down, though — how do you know that last deal had clear title? At some point you’re going to want insurance anyway. In any case, the US system is already that the government records ownership (not for free, but for a small recording fee) and the title company charges for checking, and for insurance in case they get it wrong. As just one example of how it can go wrong, here in Seattle it’s common to find out your lot is nine inches smaller than you thought because surveying technology is a lot better now than it was when your deed was written in 1908.
    - ghaff 8mo ago
      It's complicated. I live on a parcel of a very old property by US standards (early 1800s) that was subdivided shortly before I bought it. Without going into all the details, my neighbor who also lives on a parcel of the original land had a survey done and it turned out there were some significant incursions into other properties. And we're not talking inches. But, yeah, even inches (or any liens) can be an issue when it comes time to sell.
    - bluGill 8mo ago
      That depends on the state. I live in Iowa where the state records the transaction and verifies everyone's identity. Almost nobody has title insurance because there is nothing to insure. Every other state I've lived in though isn't as good about checking ID and you need title insurance (who is very good about checking id)
      - sidewndr46 8mo ago
        But how do they verify your identity? Most places I've lived used nearly useless forms of identity verification
      - skissane 8mo ago
        The system in Iowa, is instead of getting title insurance from a private insurer (as is standard in the US), you get it from a state government agency (Iowa Title Guaranty) which has a legal monopoly on all title insurance in the state. But people in Iowa say they don't have "title insurance", because the term is defined to mean private insurance, not the insurance issued by the state government. A condition of the state-issued title insurance is you need to provide an attorney's legal opinion that there are no issues with the title, and then the insurance covers the risk the attorney did a bad job, or failed to notice some obscure issue or hidden issue. But this is different from a true Torrens title system, in that title registration is not (near-)conclusive evidence of legal title, only de facto presumptive. A number of US states historically had Torrens title, but most have repealed it, effectively converting Torrens titles to non-Torrens. Illinois had it – only in Cook County – until it was repealed in 1992. California abolished it in 1955. Virginia abolished it in 2019. Washington state abolished it in 2022-2023. The big advantage of Torrens title is that it eliminates the need for title insurance, or at least makes it much cheaper. (You can still buy title insurance in Australia, but the Torrens title system significantly reduces the risk to the insurer, resulting in lower premiums–the risk it is covering is not that you don't have title to the property at all, rather risks such as the boundary fences being in the wrong places.) But in those US states which had it, title insurers wouldn't give you any discount for having it, and banks would still insist on title insurance to lend, nullifying the primary practical advantage of the Torrens system–the end result was your property was under a different title system which many didn't understand, which could make real estate transactions appear more complex, discourage buyers and lenders, etc. This resulted in political pressure from landowners on the system to be allowed to move off it, which is what resulted in it being repealed. I think the US state in which Torrens would be most likely to be successful would be Iowa, since private title insurance is banned there. However, repeated attempts to introduce Torrens in Iowa failed, because the attorneys who investigate the validity of titles saw it as a threat to their livelihoods, and they successfully lobbied the state legislature against the idea.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
    That is more or less how title insurance started back in the day. In 1800 land was sold in person only by people who knew each other, in front of other witnesses who knew everybody in town. It worked great, which is why some states (I assume like CT) never bothered with a registry. In the mid 1800s as land out west started opening up for settlement (skip the whole bad treatment of the natives) investors "out east" wanted to invest in land and ran into a problem: they didn't want to go out to the land, but they knew scams existed so they started hiring trusted people to travel instead and verify they property owner was really the person they were buying from. Some states have a registry and so you don't need that, the state tracks owners and verifies the people buying/selling really are who they say they are.
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  Yet another example where "we can't have nice things" because entrenched businesses profit from keeping things not-nice. Title Insurance shouldn't even be a thing. This should be solvable by a database.
  - the_fall 8mo ago
    There is a database. The insurance covers things that aren't in the database. Claims are exceptionally rare, so it's pretty cheap.
    - IcyWindows 8mo ago
      For the risk assumed by the title insurance, it's one of the most overpriced insurance around.
- dcrazy 8mo ago
  No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry because that is not an enumerated power of the federal government. The individual states have sovereignty over their own land and each has its own system for land registration. The article you linked to even names several states that have a partial Torrens title system. The claim that the title insurance industry is the reason for lack of adoption of Torrens title schemes is uncited, and immediately followed by descriptions of several cases where Torrens title was adopted (often poorly) and later abandoned.
  - weinzierl 8mo ago
    "No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry [..]" Fascinating, how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth? I feel the answer to this is also crucial to understanding OP. It could be a minor annoyance or the real possibility to lose your land.
    - pdonis 8mo ago
      > how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth? There is: the county clerk in the county where the land is located.
      - skissane 8mo ago
        No, the county clerk records aren’t a “single source of truth”. In the US system, it is possible to convince a court the county records are wrong, and order them overridden-which makes them not the single source of truth. By contrast, in the Torrens system, whatever the government records say are final. If you are the innocent victim of a mistake by the government (or a fraud against it), the government has to compensate you; but you don’t actually get the land back if it has since been sold to an innocent purchaser.
        pdonis 8mo ago
        > in the Torrens system, whatever the government records say are final First, it doesn't seem like that's always the case, based on another post upthread talking about a land ownership case that went to the high court because of an error in the government's records. Second, since there is no single government for the entire world, any government trying to implement a Torrens system is still going to face the problem of events happening outside its jurisdiction that its records do not and cannot contain, which affect ownership of property in its jurisdiction. So there cannot be a "single source of truth" in the sense you appear to be using the term, even in the Torrens system.
- throw0101a 8mo ago
  > Unlike most common law jurisdictions, the United States doesn't have a central land registry due to lobbying from the title insurance industry. These scammers will either (a) start with a stolen identity and see what land that person owns and try to sell it, or (b) find an interesting piece of land and steal that person's identity and pretend to be them. In either case a 'definitive' database (or lack thereof) is not the problem. Ontario and BC (e.g.) in Canada have a land registry: * https://www.ontario.ca/page/overview-land-registry https://www.ontario.ca/page/overview-land-registry * https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/real-estate-bc/land-owner-transparency-registry https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/real-esta... That hasn't stopped fraud (attempts): * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/three-charged-stolen-home-fraud-sale-1.6729115 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/three-charged-stolen-... * https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64547396 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64547396
the_fall 8mo ago
Different people understand "theft of identity" in different ways. If someone is impersonating you on the internet, or steals your credit card info and makes purchases on your behalf, that probably qualifies. As for the nature of the scam, there are different levels of this. Most likely, the mark is the buyer / the escrow agency.
jerf 8mo ago
For identity theft, I think at this point it depends on where you set the bar. I've never had someone clean out my checking account or anything truly large, but my wife and I have had fraudulent charges on our credit cards several times as they've been leaked out one way or another. I would not "identify" as a "identity theft victim" per se if you asked me out of the blue, because compared to some of what I've heard about, I've had nothing more than minor annoyances come out of this. But yeah, I'd guess that it's fair to say that at this point most people have had at least some sort of identity-related issue at some point.
rwmj 8mo ago
I also wondered why someone would own an empty lot in another town for years on end and neither build on it nor sell it.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- rationalist 8mo ago
  They inheritted it and have been lazy, they bought it for an investment, they bought it because they might want to build their retirement home on it, etc. Plenty of reasons why.
- bluGill 8mo ago
  I know people who have bought the land they want to retire on now. (if they will or not is a different question, but that is the current plan). I know people who own hunting land that they visit one weekend a year. There are people who own land to lease to a local farmer - many farmers have too much money tied up in land and want to lease some of it from someone else to spread the risks. If the land is expensive you wouldn't let it sit, but there is a lot of land that isn't very valuable that you can just own if you feel like it.
- jandrewrogers 8mo ago
  Optionality. There is also a lot of cheap land in the US, so it often isn't a large investment.
- emptybits 8mo ago
  See I can understand this. e.g. a family asset for children, a property to build a retirement home on, a hunting property, or simply a real investment.
- buildsjets 8mo ago
  Buy low, sell high.
- Marsymars 8mo ago
  I grew up on a big property and when my parents moved, they divided the land and sold the part with the house with the idea that they might build a house on the empty land upon retirement. I'm guessing at this point that they're not going to do that, so at some point I'll probably inherit some empty land.
eszed 8mo ago
I'm equally careful and aware. Years ago, now, I discovered that someone in New Mexico (if I recall correctly) was working under my Social Security number. That was likely someone not authorized to work in the US writing random digits on an I9 form. No amount of care will protect against that. It wasn't easy to clear up, either. I'm fortunate that a close friend worked (at the time) for the SS administration, and was able to do basically all of the leg-work for me: I just had to sign a few forms he sent me. Someone not equally connected would have had a much harder time. I'm also painfully aware that effectively every scrap of everyone's personal data has been repeatedly leaked online. I doubt that any amount of care has much to do with whether or not I'll be targeted at some point in the future.
- talloaktrees 8mo ago
  does that mean someone was paying into your social security, essentially boosting your benefit amount when the time comes?
  - stackskipton 8mo ago
    If you don't dispute it, yes. However, if you don't dispute it, IRS knows about it as well and will be asking for their cut. Generally, the benefit increase is not worth higher taxes.
- m463 8mo ago
  I remember a friend's boyfriend lost his wallet in mexico. she said the next few years he got many tax returns, apparently several people using his legitimate ssn.
  - rationalist 8mo ago
    Did he store his SSN card in his wallet like so many uninformed people do?
    - ghaff 8mo ago
      I did decades ago. Wallet was stolen. Haven't had an actual card sice.
dclowd9901 8mo ago
If you broaden the definition of "stolen identity" to "someone trying to scam either you or someone else by using details on your identity" (which this story more or less is) I think a fair many of us can claim this experience.
Lerc 8mo ago
I once had a visit from cops about dodgy cheques I had been writing. Weirdly they were more ready to believe I hadn't written the cheques, than the were about me not leaving my chequebook at a brothel I hadn't visited. The last time I wrote a cheque I had to cross out the 19 to write in the year. I think they only gave up on that line of questioning when I provided enough evidence to say that the bank had not given me any chequebooks to lose. I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people. I'm guessing it counts as identity theft. Identity theft is not helped by processes that demand certainty and expediency causing pressure on employees to provide both even when they are not available. In a similar credit card issue with my partner, after all of the mess of departments trying to make it other departments' problems, my partner received an email saying that; in accordance with the phone conversation, the issue had been resolved. Having had no such phone conversation this caused a bit of panic, but upon contacting the bank they said that they had tried calling but there was no answer, but they were not allowed to resolve the issue unless they had directly spoken to the customer, so she just wrote that in, otherwise it would keep on causing problems down the line. On the other hand I have leveraged such processes to my advantage to essentially steal my own identity. For a long time I possessed no photo-id, It was actually buying a house that proved to be the intractable problem that forced me to get a passport (I also wanted to travel) . There were numerous things that required photo ID to exist even if they had not laid eyes on it themselves. It seems rather odd to me, but somehow just the idea that I have it seems enough. Luckily I was once in a situation where I needed photo ID at a time when there was sufficient context to prove my identity by other means. A staff member fudged the system to make it work. That resulted in me acquiring a form of non-photo ID that had been recorded as being verified by photo ID. I leveraged that as a form of pseudo proof-of-photo-id for a number of years.
- Marsymars 8mo ago
  > I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people. You can order legit cheques online from third party cheque printers to save money vs what banks charge for cheques, you don't need any insider access to get cheques printed.
brightball 8mo ago
I have heard of title theft but I imagine it is more prominent is areas where an attorney is not required to process the sale of a house. Some states allow "title companies" to handle this process. I'm not well versed, just passing along what I've heard from people over the years. I have always heard the best way to make sure your title can't be stolen is to have a loan against the house so that a bank is involved. As long as a bank is involved, there are numerous additional hoops for something like that.
kstrauser 8mo ago
In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant and have them disappear with it for a few minutes, about once a year my bank would call me to ask if I'd been using my card in some far-off locale: "Hi! Are you in Tijuana?" "Not since 1993. Why? What's up?" "So you didn't just try to buy gasoline at a PEMEX there?" "Nope, I'm in San Francisco as speak." "OK, thanks! We'll get a new card out in the mail to you." That's a pretty low bar for identity theft, but I think it's defensible.
- recursive 8mo ago
  You must have been going to some very shady restaurants. I still hand off my credit card to a rando. I did it today. I did it last weekend. I've never had this problem.
  - Lammy 8mo ago
    This exact thing happened to me once at the hotel bar in the Santa Clara Convention Center / Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.
  - kstrauser 8mo ago
    Not especially, I don't think. It's incredibly common according to everything I see online.
    - recursive 8mo ago
      I guess I'm just lucky.
      - ghaff 7mo ago
        "everything I see online" is probably disproportionately outliers. I use a credit card hundreds of times a year in many places around the world and at least cursorily keep my eye on charges in my statements and fraudulent charges are rare--like maybe every few years at most.
  - 8mo ago
NoSalt 8mo ago
I have had my identity stolen [at least] three times in the last 15 years: * OPM Hack * Target Hack * Equifax Hack I say "at least" because there have been more, but I just started ignoring them after a while. I also had it stolen back in the late 1990s; and, thinking back, that was crazy for that time period.
eduction 8mo ago
So you’re from a different country from the author and don’t know how systems work here but you’re going to judge them for having their identity stolen? Maybe if you actually had any first hand experience you’d be able to muster some empathy. Yea things are decentralized here because we have 50 different states, many more counties, and health insurance is through a mish mash of many insurers and health providers. We are all regularly asked for the exact information needed to steal identity for basic stuff. I got a new dentist last month who has my date of birth, ssn, and home address. I’m going to tell him to stuff it and find a better dentist by, what? Calling around and asking if they require an ssn? I have also never been the victim of identity theft but if you live here you would know luck plays a major role, always. If you want to marinate in the superiority of you home country you are welcome to. Maybe don’t post on foreign message boards then.
- eduction 8mo ago
  Update - just tonight got a letter from a company called Conduent disclosing my medical billing records were compromised more than a year ago. Offering me “free” credit monitoring.
happyopossum 8mo ago
> Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere? As with most things both law-related and US-related, it depends. This type of scam would not work in the majority of states due to various laws, regulations, and bookkeeping (it would be nearly* impossible to sell land you don’t own in California for example). There are other states (and countries - I’m looking at you Canada) where fraudulent documentation and virtually non-existent title checks allow this kind of fraud to persist. [*] yes - virtually, not completely. It can happen, but the laws are set up such that the land owner will retain their land, the title fraud victim will be made whole financially by a title insurance company. What this means in practice is that title insurance companies make sure every transaction is legitimate and people don’t have to worry about it.
- rtpg 8mo ago
  Though I think there's way less of this issue in Japan because there are a lot of gov't-involving procedures and record ownership in land ownership transfers making it quite hard to go all the way(and hey, even in the US you have title insurance), there was a bit of a wild case a couple years back where a fraudster sold a 5.5 billion yen piece of land to a major developer[0]. Fraud is always fun to look at because people are constantly looking for those little windows of trust that end up forming in these flows because otherwise everything would take months to execute upon. [0]:https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181121/p2a/00m/0na/005000c https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181121/p2a/00m/0na/00...
- a2tech 8mo ago
  So the scam here doesn't seem to be ACTUALLY selling the land--it's basically engaging a realtor long enough to get earnest money on the table, then to disappear. Although if they could go far enough to get an entire amount wired to them I'm sure they'd take it. Since a lot of people are doing all cash (non-financed) deals lately, I could see how a scammer and a lax realtor could possibly scam an overzealous buyer out of the full amount.
  - happyopossum 8mo ago
    That still wouldn’t work in most states. The earnest money and the final payment are handled by an escrow company who does all the title verification or works hand in hand with the company doing the title verification. Neither set of funds is ever just handed over. Again - it varies state to state, as the constitution dictates.
bsder 8mo ago
> I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Centralized vs decentralized isn't relevant. The issue is that nobody wants to have one of the icky humans in the loop because they have the temerity to ask to be paid a salary. Consequently, everybody tries to set up systems where everything can be done online with no in-person interactions ever required. This works, sorta, until the fraudsters start figuring out the seams. But because you would have to give some icky human cash, everybody is fighting tooth and nail to revert back to having any humans moderating the problems. The correct solution is to call this kind of thing what it is--fraud--and treat it as such. And the proper point for the liability are the companies and agencies that do nothing to prevent the fraud and not all the poor slobs. A couple of nice big payouts where banks or agencies have to cough up to make everybody whole due to their negligence and suddenly all the systems will get much more stringent.

x0x0 8mo ago

They're not trying to transfer ownership. They're trying to scam people out of the earnest money before a title search (ie ownership verification) happens. Titles are very decentralized; they are likely modestly-competently managed at the county level, of which there up to 254 per state (Texas). And identity theft is also very easy in the US. It happened to an old in my family. The state dmv happily mailed a replacement license to a completely different state without so much as checking with the person whose license it is. Just for the asking. It's absurd.

jjmarr 8mo ago

Unlike most common law jurisdictions, the United States doesn't have a central land registry due to lobbying from the title insurance industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#United_States

nine_k 8mo ago
I wonder why a commercial entity that registers ownership / titles for free, and bills for checking, did not spring up. Clearly there is moneyed demand for certainty about title rights, and if you can provide certainty (because the last deal was registered with you), it may be a more desirable product than mere insurance.
- wrs 8mo ago
  It’s turtles all the way down, though — how do you know that last deal had clear title? At some point you’re going to want insurance anyway. In any case, the US system is already that the government records ownership (not for free, but for a small recording fee) and the title company charges for checking, and for insurance in case they get it wrong. As just one example of how it can go wrong, here in Seattle it’s common to find out your lot is nine inches smaller than you thought because surveying technology is a lot better now than it was when your deed was written in 1908.
  - ghaff 8mo ago
    It's complicated. I live on a parcel of a very old property by US standards (early 1800s) that was subdivided shortly before I bought it. Without going into all the details, my neighbor who also lives on a parcel of the original land had a survey done and it turned out there were some significant incursions into other properties. And we're not talking inches. But, yeah, even inches (or any liens) can be an issue when it comes time to sell.
  - bluGill 8mo ago
    That depends on the state. I live in Iowa where the state records the transaction and verifies everyone's identity. Almost nobody has title insurance because there is nothing to insure. Every other state I've lived in though isn't as good about checking ID and you need title insurance (who is very good about checking id)
    - sidewndr46 8mo ago
      But how do they verify your identity? Most places I've lived used nearly useless forms of identity verification
    - skissane 8mo ago
      The system in Iowa, is instead of getting title insurance from a private insurer (as is standard in the US), you get it from a state government agency (Iowa Title Guaranty) which has a legal monopoly on all title insurance in the state. But people in Iowa say they don't have "title insurance", because the term is defined to mean private insurance, not the insurance issued by the state government. A condition of the state-issued title insurance is you need to provide an attorney's legal opinion that there are no issues with the title, and then the insurance covers the risk the attorney did a bad job, or failed to notice some obscure issue or hidden issue. But this is different from a true Torrens title system, in that title registration is not (near-)conclusive evidence of legal title, only de facto presumptive. A number of US states historically had Torrens title, but most have repealed it, effectively converting Torrens titles to non-Torrens. Illinois had it – only in Cook County – until it was repealed in 1992. California abolished it in 1955. Virginia abolished it in 2019. Washington state abolished it in 2022-2023. The big advantage of Torrens title is that it eliminates the need for title insurance, or at least makes it much cheaper. (You can still buy title insurance in Australia, but the Torrens title system significantly reduces the risk to the insurer, resulting in lower premiums–the risk it is covering is not that you don't have title to the property at all, rather risks such as the boundary fences being in the wrong places.) But in those US states which had it, title insurers wouldn't give you any discount for having it, and banks would still insist on title insurance to lend, nullifying the primary practical advantage of the Torrens system–the end result was your property was under a different title system which many didn't understand, which could make real estate transactions appear more complex, discourage buyers and lenders, etc. This resulted in political pressure from landowners on the system to be allowed to move off it, which is what resulted in it being repealed. I think the US state in which Torrens would be most likely to be successful would be Iowa, since private title insurance is banned there. However, repeated attempts to introduce Torrens in Iowa failed, because the attorneys who investigate the validity of titles saw it as a threat to their livelihoods, and they successfully lobbied the state legislature against the idea.
- bluGill 8mo ago
  That is more or less how title insurance started back in the day. In 1800 land was sold in person only by people who knew each other, in front of other witnesses who knew everybody in town. It worked great, which is why some states (I assume like CT) never bothered with a registry. In the mid 1800s as land out west started opening up for settlement (skip the whole bad treatment of the natives) investors "out east" wanted to invest in land and ran into a problem: they didn't want to go out to the land, but they knew scams existed so they started hiring trusted people to travel instead and verify they property owner was really the person they were buying from. Some states have a registry and so you don't need that, the state tracks owners and verifies the people buying/selling really are who they say they are.
ryandrake 8mo ago
Yet another example where "we can't have nice things" because entrenched businesses profit from keeping things not-nice. Title Insurance shouldn't even be a thing. This should be solvable by a database.
- the_fall 8mo ago
  There is a database. The insurance covers things that aren't in the database. Claims are exceptionally rare, so it's pretty cheap.
  - IcyWindows 8mo ago
    For the risk assumed by the title insurance, it's one of the most overpriced insurance around.
dcrazy 8mo ago
No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry because that is not an enumerated power of the federal government. The individual states have sovereignty over their own land and each has its own system for land registration. The article you linked to even names several states that have a partial Torrens title system. The claim that the title insurance industry is the reason for lack of adoption of Torrens title schemes is uncited, and immediately followed by descriptions of several cases where Torrens title was adopted (often poorly) and later abandoned.
- weinzierl 8mo ago
  "No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry [..]" Fascinating, how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth? I feel the answer to this is also crucial to understanding OP. It could be a minor annoyance or the real possibility to lose your land.
  - pdonis 8mo ago
    > how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth? There is: the county clerk in the county where the land is located.
    - skissane 8mo ago
      No, the county clerk records aren’t a “single source of truth”. In the US system, it is possible to convince a court the county records are wrong, and order them overridden-which makes them not the single source of truth. By contrast, in the Torrens system, whatever the government records say are final. If you are the innocent victim of a mistake by the government (or a fraud against it), the government has to compensate you; but you don’t actually get the land back if it has since been sold to an innocent purchaser.
      - pdonis 8mo ago
        > in the Torrens system, whatever the government records say are final First, it doesn't seem like that's always the case, based on another post upthread talking about a land ownership case that went to the high court because of an error in the government's records. Second, since there is no single government for the entire world, any government trying to implement a Torrens system is still going to face the problem of events happening outside its jurisdiction that its records do not and cannot contain, which affect ownership of property in its jurisdiction. So there cannot be a "single source of truth" in the sense you appear to be using the term, even in the Torrens system.
throw0101a 8mo ago
> Unlike most common law jurisdictions, the United States doesn't have a central land registry due to lobbying from the title insurance industry. These scammers will either (a) start with a stolen identity and see what land that person owns and try to sell it, or (b) find an interesting piece of land and steal that person's identity and pretend to be them. In either case a 'definitive' database (or lack thereof) is not the problem. Ontario and BC (e.g.) in Canada have a land registry: * https://www.ontario.ca/page/overview-land-registry https://www.ontario.ca/page/overview-land-registry * https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/real-estate-bc/land-owner-transparency-registry https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/real-esta... That hasn't stopped fraud (attempts): * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/three-charged-stolen-home-fraud-sale-1.6729115 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/three-charged-stolen-... * https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64547396 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64547396

the_fall 8mo ago

Different people understand "theft of identity" in different ways. If someone is impersonating you on the internet, or steals your credit card info and makes purchases on your behalf, that probably qualifies. As for the nature of the scam, there are different levels of this. Most likely, the mark is the buyer / the escrow agency.

jerf 8mo ago

For identity theft, I think at this point it depends on where you set the bar. I've never had someone clean out my checking account or anything truly large, but my wife and I have had fraudulent charges on our credit cards several times as they've been leaked out one way or another. I would not "identify" as a "identity theft victim" per se if you asked me out of the blue, because compared to some of what I've heard about, I've had nothing more than minor annoyances come out of this. But yeah, I'd guess that it's fair to say that at this point most people have had at least some sort of identity-related issue at some point.

rwmj 8mo ago

I also wondered why someone would own an empty lot in another town for years on end and neither build on it nor sell it.

deleted 8mo ago
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rationalist 8mo ago
They inheritted it and have been lazy, they bought it for an investment, they bought it because they might want to build their retirement home on it, etc. Plenty of reasons why.
bluGill 8mo ago
I know people who have bought the land they want to retire on now. (if they will or not is a different question, but that is the current plan). I know people who own hunting land that they visit one weekend a year. There are people who own land to lease to a local farmer - many farmers have too much money tied up in land and want to lease some of it from someone else to spread the risks. If the land is expensive you wouldn't let it sit, but there is a lot of land that isn't very valuable that you can just own if you feel like it.
jandrewrogers 8mo ago
Optionality. There is also a lot of cheap land in the US, so it often isn't a large investment.
emptybits 8mo ago
See I can understand this. e.g. a family asset for children, a property to build a retirement home on, a hunting property, or simply a real investment.
buildsjets 8mo ago
Buy low, sell high.
Marsymars 8mo ago
I grew up on a big property and when my parents moved, they divided the land and sold the part with the house with the idea that they might build a house on the empty land upon retirement. I'm guessing at this point that they're not going to do that, so at some point I'll probably inherit some empty land.

eszed 8mo ago

I'm equally careful and aware. Years ago, now, I discovered that someone in New Mexico (if I recall correctly) was working under my Social Security number. That was likely someone not authorized to work in the US writing random digits on an I9 form. No amount of care will protect against that. It wasn't easy to clear up, either. I'm fortunate that a close friend worked (at the time) for the SS administration, and was able to do basically all of the leg-work for me: I just had to sign a few forms he sent me. Someone not equally connected would have had a much harder time. I'm also painfully aware that effectively every scrap of everyone's personal data has been repeatedly leaked online. I doubt that any amount of care has much to do with whether or not I'll be targeted at some point in the future.

talloaktrees 8mo ago
does that mean someone was paying into your social security, essentially boosting your benefit amount when the time comes?
- stackskipton 8mo ago
  If you don't dispute it, yes. However, if you don't dispute it, IRS knows about it as well and will be asking for their cut. Generally, the benefit increase is not worth higher taxes.
m463 8mo ago
I remember a friend's boyfriend lost his wallet in mexico. she said the next few years he got many tax returns, apparently several people using his legitimate ssn.
- rationalist 8mo ago
  Did he store his SSN card in his wallet like so many uninformed people do?
  - ghaff 8mo ago
    I did decades ago. Wallet was stolen. Haven't had an actual card sice.

dclowd9901 8mo ago

If you broaden the definition of "stolen identity" to "someone trying to scam either you or someone else by using details on your identity" (which this story more or less is) I think a fair many of us can claim this experience.

Lerc 8mo ago

I once had a visit from cops about dodgy cheques I had been writing. Weirdly they were more ready to believe I hadn't written the cheques, than the were about me not leaving my chequebook at a brothel I hadn't visited. The last time I wrote a cheque I had to cross out the 19 to write in the year. I think they only gave up on that line of questioning when I provided enough evidence to say that the bank had not given me any chequebooks to lose. I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people. I'm guessing it counts as identity theft. Identity theft is not helped by processes that demand certainty and expediency causing pressure on employees to provide both even when they are not available. In a similar credit card issue with my partner, after all of the mess of departments trying to make it other departments' problems, my partner received an email saying that; in accordance with the phone conversation, the issue had been resolved. Having had no such phone conversation this caused a bit of panic, but upon contacting the bank they said that they had tried calling but there was no answer, but they were not allowed to resolve the issue unless they had directly spoken to the customer, so she just wrote that in, otherwise it would keep on causing problems down the line. On the other hand I have leveraged such processes to my advantage to essentially steal my own identity. For a long time I possessed no photo-id, It was actually buying a house that proved to be the intractable problem that forced me to get a passport (I also wanted to travel) . There were numerous things that required photo ID to exist even if they had not laid eyes on it themselves. It seems rather odd to me, but somehow just the idea that I have it seems enough. Luckily I was once in a situation where I needed photo ID at a time when there was sufficient context to prove my identity by other means. A staff member fudged the system to make it work. That resulted in me acquiring a form of non-photo ID that had been recorded as being verified by photo ID. I leveraged that as a form of pseudo proof-of-photo-id for a number of years.

Marsymars 8mo ago
> I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people. You can order legit cheques online from third party cheque printers to save money vs what banks charge for cheques, you don't need any insider access to get cheques printed.

brightball 8mo ago

I have heard of title theft but I imagine it is more prominent is areas where an attorney is not required to process the sale of a house. Some states allow "title companies" to handle this process. I'm not well versed, just passing along what I've heard from people over the years. I have always heard the best way to make sure your title can't be stolen is to have a loan against the house so that a bank is involved. As long as a bank is involved, there are numerous additional hoops for something like that.

kstrauser 8mo ago

In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant and have them disappear with it for a few minutes, about once a year my bank would call me to ask if I'd been using my card in some far-off locale: "Hi! Are you in Tijuana?" "Not since 1993. Why? What's up?" "So you didn't just try to buy gasoline at a PEMEX there?" "Nope, I'm in San Francisco as speak." "OK, thanks! We'll get a new card out in the mail to you." That's a pretty low bar for identity theft, but I think it's defensible.

recursive 8mo ago
You must have been going to some very shady restaurants. I still hand off my credit card to a rando. I did it today. I did it last weekend. I've never had this problem.
- Lammy 8mo ago
  This exact thing happened to me once at the hotel bar in the Santa Clara Convention Center / Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.
- kstrauser 8mo ago
  Not especially, I don't think. It's incredibly common according to everything I see online.
  - recursive 8mo ago
    I guess I'm just lucky.
    - ghaff 7mo ago
      "everything I see online" is probably disproportionately outliers. I use a credit card hundreds of times a year in many places around the world and at least cursorily keep my eye on charges in my statements and fraudulent charges are rare--like maybe every few years at most.
- 8mo ago

NoSalt 8mo ago

I have had my identity stolen [at least] three times in the last 15 years: * OPM Hack * Target Hack * Equifax Hack I say "at least" because there have been more, but I just started ignoring them after a while. I also had it stolen back in the late 1990s; and, thinking back, that was crazy for that time period.

eduction 8mo ago

So you’re from a different country from the author and don’t know how systems work here but you’re going to judge them for having their identity stolen? Maybe if you actually had any first hand experience you’d be able to muster some empathy. Yea things are decentralized here because we have 50 different states, many more counties, and health insurance is through a mish mash of many insurers and health providers. We are all regularly asked for the exact information needed to steal identity for basic stuff. I got a new dentist last month who has my date of birth, ssn, and home address. I’m going to tell him to stuff it and find a better dentist by, what? Calling around and asking if they require an ssn? I have also never been the victim of identity theft but if you live here you would know luck plays a major role, always. If you want to marinate in the superiority of you home country you are welcome to. Maybe don’t post on foreign message boards then.

eduction 8mo ago
Update - just tonight got a letter from a company called Conduent disclosing my medical billing records were compromised more than a year ago. Offering me “free” credit monitoring.

happyopossum 8mo ago

> Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere? As with most things both law-related and US-related, it depends. This type of scam would not work in the majority of states due to various laws, regulations, and bookkeeping (it would be nearly* impossible to sell land you don’t own in California for example). There are other states (and countries - I’m looking at you Canada) where fraudulent documentation and virtually non-existent title checks allow this kind of fraud to persist. [*] yes - virtually, not completely. It can happen, but the laws are set up such that the land owner will retain their land, the title fraud victim will be made whole financially by a title insurance company. What this means in practice is that title insurance companies make sure every transaction is legitimate and people don’t have to worry about it.

rtpg 8mo ago
Though I think there's way less of this issue in Japan because there are a lot of gov't-involving procedures and record ownership in land ownership transfers making it quite hard to go all the way(and hey, even in the US you have title insurance), there was a bit of a wild case a couple years back where a fraudster sold a 5.5 billion yen piece of land to a major developer[0]. Fraud is always fun to look at because people are constantly looking for those little windows of trust that end up forming in these flows because otherwise everything would take months to execute upon. [0]:https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181121/p2a/00m/0na/005000c https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181121/p2a/00m/0na/00...
a2tech 8mo ago
So the scam here doesn't seem to be ACTUALLY selling the land--it's basically engaging a realtor long enough to get earnest money on the table, then to disappear. Although if they could go far enough to get an entire amount wired to them I'm sure they'd take it. Since a lot of people are doing all cash (non-financed) deals lately, I could see how a scammer and a lax realtor could possibly scam an overzealous buyer out of the full amount.
- happyopossum 8mo ago
  That still wouldn’t work in most states. The earnest money and the final payment are handled by an escrow company who does all the title verification or works hand in hand with the company doing the title verification. Neither set of funds is ever just handed over. Again - it varies state to state, as the constitution dictates.

bsder 8mo ago

> I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Centralized vs decentralized isn't relevant. The issue is that nobody wants to have one of the icky humans in the loop because they have the temerity to ask to be paid a salary. Consequently, everybody tries to set up systems where everything can be done online with no in-person interactions ever required. This works, sorta, until the fraudsters start figuring out the seams. But because you would have to give some icky human cash, everybody is fighting tooth and nail to revert back to having any humans moderating the problems. The correct solution is to call this kind of thing what it is--fraud--and treat it as such. And the proper point for the liability are the companies and agencies that do nothing to prevent the fraud and not all the poor slobs. A couple of nice big payouts where banks or agencies have to cough up to make everybody whole due to their negligence and suddenly all the systems will get much more stringent.