Time for Mortgage Documents to Carry Their Own Photo ID, like the Rest of Us?
"Paul Reviczky, who fled Hungary in 1957 to escape Communist persecution, is one of the latest homeowners to discover that Ontario law favours banks, mortgage companies and purchasers over victims of fraud.", according to Harold Levy of the Toronto Star.
The recipe for this fraud is rather simple, probably disturbingly so to people who are unfamiliar with the Land Titles System and the Ontario Court of Appeal Decision, Household Realty v. Chan which decided that if person A faked a power of attorney for Person B and thereby obtained a mortgage on B's property, the mortgagee was entitled to look to both Person A and B for recompense.
How to Sell as House that isn't Yours.
- Look for a rental house, so that you can obtain an empty house - which shows better than a lived in house.
- Pay cash for the rent, and be only in contact by cell phone. Paying a little too much cash helps grease the process.
- Obtain a fake identification for the landlord, a fake driver's license is best. You may have to dumpster dive for this.
- Find an unsuspecting lawyer and obtain a fraudulent power of attorney, using the fake identification in 3, and transfer control of house to landlord's non-existent "son".
- Have son sell house to innocent parties.
- Skip town, go to new town and start with 1. again.
What step in this process is the easiest to stop? Suppose that the mortgage documents had Paul Reviczky's photo tagged by a hyperlink to them. Then step 4 doesn't work - the phto in the fake identification in 3 will not match the real photo in the mortgage documents in 5 and so the sale cannot close.
Cost of one photo hyperlink from Motor Licensing to Land Titles: may be $100 per link. Cost of preventing mortgage fraud: Priceless.
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