House sale scammers

MY FAMILY had an experience similar to Max Hastings’s house scam

( mail) involving the house where my mother used to live, which belonged to my brother and me.

in January 2009, the house was empty and we put it on the market. the estate agents marketed the house appropriately, showing people around in our absence.

the market was slow but we sold it in June 2009 to a nice couple at an agreed price. One day later, we got a letter from a solicitor saying he needed signatures from us to complete our deal with a lady of whom we had never heard.

alarm bells rang, i rang the solicitor in question and we realised what had happened.

a man had viewed the house and no more had been heard from him by the estate agent. meanwhile the firm of solicitors (bogus, with qualifications from Nigeria) got in touch with the solicitors who had asked us for signatures, and said they were working for us. they arranged to buy our house, without our knowledge.

they had gone on to the Land registry website, found out who owned the house (my brother and me), then gone to a bank and got a mortgage. the money was paid to them via their solicitor and they ran off with it.

the Land registry is now paperless and anyone can have access to your records. these scammers target empty prop- erties and are long gone by the time the theft is discovered.

i tried to contact the bank about this but it would not talk to me as i was not this woman. i explained she did not exist and that it had been scammed but it wouldn’t listen.

it was not until i contacted the bank’s legal department that it finally spoke to the Land registry and sorted it out.

We then had to go to our legitimate solicitor and swear affidavits to the effect that we knew nothing of this and the house had belonged to us for 20 years. People who hear this story tend to say: ‘We have our deeds in a safe place.’

We had the deeds but it meant nothing: everything is now registered electronically.

We didn’t lose the house but it wasn’t the house the scammers wanted, only the mortgage money.

Name and address supplied.