having your house stolen

[thumbwitch]

I have just seen the evening news about a lady who rented out her house while she was abroad for 6 months and when she came back, it had been stolen - i.e the name on the deeds had been changed to a Mr. Patel and a mortgage had been taken out on the property for over £500K. Apparently this is becoming more common now (I'd never heard of it before!) because the Government allow people to download Deeds and house plans on the internet, so anyone could get hold of them, and if you happen to be a tenant in a house then you can pass yourself off as the owner!

Does anyone know anything about this?

Yeah, i've heard of this happening. To do with all the legal info being up on the Land Registry website, I think.

damn! i'd never heard that before.

Likely story.
Interesting how it's a Mr Patel and not a Mr Callahan eh?

me either - bit worried because am going to be emigrating to Oz-land at some point and was going to rent out the house here in case things don't work out over there

No court would accept a property deed printed from a website. Is this being confused with tenants or squatters rights?

We're renting from someone who is abroad for a couple of years.

Wouldn't dream of trying to take his house, though. How awful. This is his greatest asset. He worked so hard for this. He's volunteering his time in his retirement to train primary teachers and headmasters (as he was himself).

What a vile thing to do to someone.

Littlelapin, I always thought the small claims court was called just that because the debts one can claim against are errr small, ie not large enough to have to sell ones home to cover iyswim????

My boss was discussing this sort of scenario about a month ago.

small claims court is for amounts up to £5000 - or was last time i checked, admittedly 4 years ago now.

littlelapin, thanks for link

Happened to me several years ago - my tenant passed the property off as his place (and as a bloody industrial unit as well!! )

I got my money back (just! ) but I am sure that bloke was responsible for several small businesses going under, as he'd passed himself off as a business and had work done for 'his' company for which he'd never paid.

and it was a stroke of complete luck that I got my money back .

YCBS - did you have to take said dodgy bloke to court to regain your money? ANd did you get your property back?

Yes, we ended up with loads of legal battles - more with the letting agents than with the tennant but yes, we did get the property back.

We had to prove that we owned the property, that the letting agent had been negligent, that the tennant had been lying. The whole onus was on us to prove it.

ANd it was only over a 3 month period.... The whole thing took about a year to resolve.

Quite scary.

Eep, I hope that someone is doing something to protect innocent houseowners from this now..

hijack sorry

\o hiya devil x