Is it roughly the same to "prove" your identity in the US as it is in the UK? In the US, at least for most credit checks, you just need your SSN, some public record data about where you've lived, and personal data (name, DOB, etc).
It's largely because there is no "National ID" system in the US (due to political reasons). That makes it hard for companies to track people, and the SSN is the only number that people consistently have.
Are there any examples of countries where their government is getting this right and eliminating stupid fraud?
Currently buying a house in the UK and it involved rather a lot of ID verification. I had to provide, to the bank, estate agent, mortgage broker and lawyers, the following: passport, driving license, utility bills, payslips, source of funds, bank statements, app-based liveness verification and more.
However, in the event of an off-market cash transaction, a lot fewer parties are involved - potentially just a conveyancer/solicitor. I'm guessing it's them who hugely dropped the ball in identity verification.
Same here. We completed over the summer and even had to provide our marriage certificate to the bank (no idea why, are single people not allowed mortgages?). Sounds very much like the conveyancers (lawyers) screwed up massively. There still some bits of this story I don't understand. Like, how did the fraudster get access to the house in the first place? Did he break in then fix the damage and replace the locks so he had a set of keys to give to the "buyer"?
The breaking in is not really that hard. It could be a simple as calling a locksmith, telling them you were out of town on business and lost your keys, and asking them to re-key or replace the locks.
If you've got the ID to sell the house, you certainly have enough ID to convince anyone else.
> We completed over the summer and even had to provide our marriage certificate to the bank (no idea why, are single people not allowed mortgages?).
Single people are allowed mortgages. Certain property ownership forms are only available to married couples, and anything recorded in that form incorrectly will revert to a different form with different consequences if the owners were not qualified; there are also different provisions that might affect other interests in the property that apply based on the presence of absence of a marital relationship among the owners.
So, a lienholder is going to want to be as certain as possible about the actual relation of the parties.
The mortgage lists the equity, joint implies 50-50 unless you were to specify otherwise.
There is zero difference if you are married, best friends, siblings, co habitating, two people who had never met before etc. In all likelyhood a divorce would change the equity, not keep it 50-50.
Imagine that you run a business where it is important to properly check the ID of your customer. You need to know two things: the photographic ID matches the person, and there is a real living person present there, not just some scammer who stole the ID.
In real life this is a simple task. You look at the photo on the ID, then you look at the person and check that they match. You also would immediately notice if something is weird, like they are wearing a lifelike mask, or they are a plastic doll.
Why does this not work for businesses then? There can be two reason: either they want to check the customers ID remotely through the internet, or the customer is present in their office but the business does not trust their own employees to check them.
Why would a business not trust their own employees? Because the company employees are in the best position to perpetuate some fraud on the business. Very often clerks receive some direct compensation or bonus based on how many new customers they subscribe for example, and if not properly checked this can incentivise the employees invent fake customers for you for example.
So you want to check the ID of a person in some way you can conduct remotely without trusting anyone physically present. Simple! You ask for an image of the ID and a photo of the customer, then a remote employee or machine learning model can decide if they match up.
But there is a problem with that! Anyone who is sophisticated enough to scam you with a fake ID will also be able to give you a matching photo. Ugh oh.
How do you solve this? You ask for the ID as previously, but instead of asking for a photo you ask for a video of the customer. Maybe you even flash the phone’s screen while recording the video with random colours and ask the customer to read up randomly selected digits. This way you can be sure that the video is not just some previous stock footage, or plastic doll or who knows. This is what is being refered to as “app-based liveness verification”
Now of course you might notice that this is an arms race. You make a better verification tool, and the scammers make a better scam. I bet that there is already someone out there training a neural network to create an animated deep fake which is convincing and can reflect the flashing colours appropriately and can read up the digits too. Likewise there is someone who is working on detecting that. What matters is that the business is trying to keep the cost of deception high enough so it is not worth doing at scale.
I believe it depends, a house sale is no "ordinary" matter.
In other european countries like, say, Italy, Spain, France there are national ID's and - opposed to solicitors like in the UK - notaries which are a sort of public officials for the contract (and they will check and certify the identities of the people involved, besides the acts of property) and you won't likely be able to open an account or however cash a check (I mean large sums, like the sale of a house) with someone else's identity in any bank without proper ID.
Possibly, with at least two well forged pieces of ID[1], you can get around it in the bank, but I don't think it is easy.
[1] this is (or used to be) a common request, though I doubt it is Law, when you want to open a bank account in Italy, and you need to exhibit the actual documents, not a photo or similar.
It sounds like the fraudster got a copy of the real person's driving licence, although he must have looked the real person presumably.
A Solicitor has to due the legal due-diligence to make sure they have the right to sell including usually ownership of the title deeds but if you don't have the title deeds and they are held by the Land Registry in name only, this is fairly easy to get around.
I smell an insurance claim against the Solicitor but it depends whether they did everything correctly or not, otherwise I don't know where he stands.
though presumably in "these trying times" the entire transaction was done remotely and so the proof of ID was images/photos/scans rather than seeing the originals - a lot easier to forge and alter
I have never done this for personal house sales in the UK, the only time we did it was when getting a commercial lease signed by the directors and each of them had to ID at the Solicitors offices.
Thinking about it, it does seem very open to abuse!
There is no such thing as "getting this right" the way you're thinking. No matter what you choose, any possible source of truth will be imperfect. In this case, the UK Land Registry is used as a source of truth, but didn't thoroughly check IDs. Seemingly because the UK ID system is used as a source of truth, but then itself failed in some way.
With an ambient concept of ownership, one is inherently left with a tradeoff between trusting the system as defined and being able to override it. In fact, this is exactly what caused this failure of the victim being unable to get their house back - compared to the common law deed system still prevalent in the US, whereby the buyer would be left without any title and would have to fall back on title insurance to be made whole.
The only way to eliminate fraud is to define away right and wrong, creating a single source of truth ala Bitcoin [0]. In Bitcoin if you have the privkey to a pubkey, then you can transfer value to a new pubkey, period - there is no such thing as theft, as it has been defined away. But obviously this isn't the kind of harsh regime people have in mind when they say they want to eliminate fraud.
FWIW the political problem in the US preventing national ID is the complete lack of ability to reign in corporate behavior. The ongoing abuse of SSN and drivers license numbers by private surveillance companies needs to be stopped (by something akin to the GDPR) before it would make any sense to talk about creating even stronger identification.
[0] Actually this is going to fail for Bitcoin as well, because it lacks the key ecash property of untraceability. Since it lacks fungibility, it's only a matter of time until courts routinely override the computational system with their own version of truth.
"It's largely because there is no "National ID" system in the US (due to political reasons). That makes it hard for companies to track people, and the SSN is the only number that people consistently have."
> REAL ID is a federal law, not an actual piece of ID. Congress passed the REAL ID Act in 2005. The act established minimum security standards for state-issued driver licenses and ID cards.
Seems pretty questionable as to whether due diligence was done given the first indicator neighbors had of the sale was after the transaction occurred. At least in the U.S. it's typically pretty tough to miss that a house is up for sale - signage, open houses, realtors showing up to give tours. Curious how this buyer even connected with the seller.
I live in the USA, this year we both sold our previous home and purchased our new home without the use of signage, open houses, tours, realtors, etc. We found the house we bought and found the buyers of our old house through our network of friends. We filled out all the paperwork from forms we printed off online. The title company took care of everything after that. It was all done completely online until the very last signing. At that signing the title company person told us that they are almost ready to have everything completely done online so that nobody ever has to meet in person. So, shortly it will be possible to completely buy and sell a house without ever meeting in person. At the time I was just thinking about how easy and convenient it all was (and how much money we saved by not having realtors), but now I’m wondering about the fraud aspects.
> I live in the USA, this year we both sold our previous home and purchased our new home without the use of signage, open houses, tours, realtors, etc. We found the house we bought and found the buyers of our old house through our network of friends. We filled out all the paperwork from forms we printed off online.
Surely you left a massive amount of money on the table then, right?
> Surely you left a massive amount of money on the table then, right?
s/surely/potentially/
They may have been better off also. At least the agent commissions are saved, and maybe other costs. If the buyer is motivated to buy, who knows if they weren't already over market?
Yeah, here in the UK one of my friends bought his home off another of my friends. A third friend practices commercial property law, so she's insured to buy and sell property and did all their paperwork at mates rates. (Her employer buys her insurance, but it's personal insurance, so it covers her off-the-clock work too)
I laughed at an old fashioned estate agent who wanted 1.2% to sell my house. Realtor prices in the US seem shockingly excessive. I guess it explains how Modern Family live such a nice lifestyle I guess.
In what way? We sat down and decided how much we wanted for our house and told the potential buyers how much. They thought about it for a day and then told us they would give us that much money for the house. Maybe we could have made more on the open market, but we were happy and they were happy.
> Maybe we could have made more on the open market, but we were happy and they were happy.
That's my point. You could potentially have made a lot more money on the open market. Especially if the buyers didn't even try to negotiate. That usually means they would pay more (let alone what other buyers might pay).
The value of your house is what people are willing to pay for it, not what you think it's worth or what you want for it.
Sure, but you've invalidated the argument with your own example - there was a personal link. In this case, it seems to have been a complete stranger given the"seller" was an imposter.
In the UK there's no requirement that 'For Sale' signs be put up. Very few people look for a house to buy by driving around looking for such signs - online listings are what drive the traffic these days, and you can sell a house with nothing but online listings.
Of course, most buyers will want to see the house themselves before making an offer, as estate agents are famously creative in their property descriptions. If you're getting a mortgage to buy a house, the bank will generally insist on a 'survey' where an independent third party turns up and confirms that the building physically exists and suchlike.
Off market sales are not unheard of in the USA -- my neighbor's condo was sold off-market. They were talking to a realtor to prepare to sell, and the realtor put them into touch with a buyer that paid cash for higher than they planned to list it at. So it's completely possible for a home to sell without neighbors being aware of it.
Also, in my experience, many homes are listed on the realtors MLS systems before they hit public sites like Zillow.
I bought my house right after it was listed on my realtors MLS system -- I had already made an offer before it ever hit Zillow or before there was a For Sale sign in the yard.
Not sure whether they will ever find the link. Regarding signs etc. it sounds like the owner worked away so maybe the neighbours just assumed that he was selling?
In the UK, it is very much a paperwork exercise, I have never met any of the solicitors I have sold houses with, haven't even spoken to most of them (everything on email)
The situation with government data in the US is extremely frustrating. Between the government themselves and quasi-governmental private companies (the credit bureaus) they know practically everything about us—but we refuse to let them use that information in any kind of helpful way to make our lives easier and reduce our stress & workloads, because that would be "big brother" or a step toward ushering in the end times (for foreigners: yes, seriously, that's not a joke) or whatever.
The UK doesn't have a national ID system. It's not clear how such a system would help in this situation - if the fraudster managed to get a driving license, why would they have a problem getting an ID card.
So if you lose your phone you can never get a replacement ID?
Or is the 2FA not worth the paper it isn't printed on when it comes to replacements, and you're back to the same level of proof you need for a driving license or passport.
It's largely because there is no "National ID" system in the US (due to political reasons). That makes it hard for companies to track people, and the SSN is the only number that people consistently have.
Are there any examples of countries where their government is getting this right and eliminating stupid fraud?