Home Selling Fraudsters

17 January 2022

What would you do if you returned home after an extended stay away to discover that your home was in the process of being sold without your knowledge?  

This all sounds a little far-fetched doesn’t it but, did any of you hear the December 27^th edition of You and Yours on Radio 4 about widescale abuse of Lasting Powers of Attorney documents under the Mental Capacity Act of 2005? https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0012scr

If you had listened to this programme, then you would be as disturbed as I am about the wholesale failure of the Office of Public Guardian in granting fraudsters totally valid Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) documents where they have produced fake ID enabling them to take control of a victim’s finances and property.

For those who are not familiar with these documents, a Lasting Power of Attorney is a document that you draw up appointing a person, your attorney, to act in your best interests at some time in the future if, or when, you cannot manage your own affairs. They are a very prudent measure to use as it makes things much easier for everyone if someone is lawfully and legally able to handle finances should the need arise due to the donor’s incapacity. So, it is a very powerful document and one that you would not want to be in fraudulent hands.

In this case the victim was away looking after her elderly mother who died in May and the first time she became aware of the fraudster’s actions was when she received a weird email in June from the company holding the freehold on her property thanking her for a payment of around £200 for a pre-sale pack on her home. At first, the penny didn’t drop but on looking again she realised that the email was about a sale pack containing lots of detail about her property. The sort of thing that someone would have if they were going to sell their property.

As she had no intention of selling her property, she became very worried and started to try to find out who could have ordered this. She contacted the freeholder of her property who told her that her property was being sold and she should contact the solicitor handling the sale of the property.

She spoke to the solicitor handling the conveyancing on her property. He told her that that the person selling her property was a woman called Julie, who was her sister, and she was acting under a Lasting Power of Attorney as her sister (our victim) had lost capacity. Our fraudster had produced a valid document containing the victim’s signature and all the other documents also looked completely genuine. She spoke to the solicitors at the firm and was surprised when they requested further documents proving her case such as a letter from her fake sister’s GP stating that her fake sister had lost capacity before they would proceed with the sale of the property. She was not happy with the request for further proof, so much so that she rang the solicitors to say she was going somewhere else.

It was not until the solicitor received the phone call from the victim and asked her if she had a sister called Julie. She said that she was an only child, and it was plain that someone was trying to sell her house from under her.  Not only that, but there was a person out there claiming to be her sister who had a valid Lasting Power of Attorney to totally control her financial affairs including savings, house, everything. The document the solicitors had was a valid document with totally fake identities and witnesses on it and our victim did not know could be claiming to be her sister.

Our victim then went to her property and found the external and internal locks had been drilled out and the criminals then had access to the property and could collect her post, creating another way they could stop her from getting any information about the fraud taking place.

The journalist covering the story saw that the addresses were local and looked like friends or neighbours. She went to one of the addresses on the LPA document and showed it to the man living there. He said that he had never heard of the person claiming to be the Attorney and he was shocked to find out that his address had been used as the address for one of the witnesses to the document. This information could not be true as he had occupied the property for the past 50 odd years. He also didn’t recognise any of the people mentioned.

All of the information on the LPA was fake but it had given our fraudster the power to sell the victim’s home and this is what she was trying to do. The Office of the Public Guardian had allowed her to use fake identities and create a registered Lasting Power of Attorney on the victim.

This is amazing that fraudsters can create completely legal Power of Attorney documents using totally fraudulent information. They can then use these documents to gain access to a victim’s property and sell it without the victim’s knowledge.

Our victim tried to cancel the fraudulent document but, when telling the Office of Public Guardian about the fraud, the person at the Office told her the best way to cancel it was to agree that she had   requested the LPA but that she was now going to revoke it. She was shocked at this advice, so her family checked the advice she was given, and they were told the same story, that the only way she could cancel the fraudulent LPA was for her to agree that she agreed to put in place but that she now wanted to revoke it.

Finally, the staff at the Office of Public Guardian realised that this was fraud and said that their advice was incorrect and their staff would be retrained. They also then cancelled the document online but they then asked her to return the original the document! Impossible as she didn’t have it in the first place! However, the original LPA containing the fake information granting our fraudster control of her victim’s property and financial affairs is still out there and can still be presented at any bank or financial institution.

The Office of the Public Guardian does not check the validity of people who apply for a Lasting Power of Attorney. It is an astonishing fact that the OPG currently has a system that can give criminals documents containing fake information they can use to completely control the financial lives of their victims.

The OPG can make people extremely vulnerable to financial abuse because it has no accredited fraud investigators, in fact there are more checks by the DVLA to get a driving licence. In the light of what’s been occurring, there should be a total overhaul by the Secretary of State of the system to make it fit for purpose. This system should have robust procedures in place to protect people and it is in urgent need of a total overhaul of its public duties.

So, what chance does anyone who is victim to a fraud such as this stand in getting their rights restored in the face of such wholescale abuse?  Well, if you don’t want to put your life savings and property at risk, make sure you have a very thorough solicitor or legal consultant and you can do what I’ve recently done.

So how do they do it?

These are sophisticated criminals targeting people who own properties in their own name, with the mortgage paid off and that are currently empty. They gain the information by using requests under the Freedom of Information Act by asking for details of empty properties in certain areas. The amount of information they get is very detailed. The criminals then trawl through these lists to find their victims. The victim could be someone in long term care or perhaps away from home for family reasons. The general link is that it happens when properties are unoccupied for a long time

You can protect yourself by signing up to the HM Land Registry’s free Property Alert service which is designed to help protect your property from fraud. It only applies to England and Wales.

To sign up to the Property Alert service you will need to create a Property Alert account. This is then checked by them sending you a verification email. You then activate your account by clicking on the verification email.

Once set up, you will be notified if there is certain activity on your monitored properties such as if a person is trying to obtain a mortgage on it.

It may not stop all fraud taking place in safeguarding your property but taking the steps below is a useful start. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/property-alert

Written by Barbara Davies, director of The National Careline www.thenationalcareline.org