York County sheriff: Scammers are selling homes and land they don't own

YORK, Maine — Something felt wrong about the call Realtor Amanda Patterson took from a man looking to sell some land on Gingerbread Lane.

Patterson, who works at Samonas Realty LLC in Portsmouth, had received an inquiry about her firm selling his vacant lot on the street. When she got him on the phone, however, he couldn’t answer basic questions about his ownership of the property, which left Patterson suspicious.

A search of the property showed its true owners and a call was made to Dorothy and Jim Murray of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, letting them know that someone had tried to sell their property without them knowing. The couple was taken by surprise, she said.

“I think anybody would be shocked,” Patterson said.

While the Murrays’ property was saved, other people have fallen victim to fraudulent land deals, only learning of the transaction after it has taken place. York County Sheriff William King said he has seen cases throughout southern Maine in which scammers either tried or succeeded in convincing brokers they are legal sellers.

Deed law makes it hard to undo such transactions, and King said the money from the sale is often wired out of the country before it can be stopped. He said some landowners learned about their property being sold after the new owner began construction on the lot.

“Scams that require no complicity are especially perplexing,” King said. “This scam is especially, I think, heinous because people aren’t doing anything. All they do is own property.”

York Beach killing: Man pleads guilty to bludgeoning girlfriend to death with rock

Scammers target out-of-state landowners with online information

Deed fraud is not necessarily new, according to Andrew Samonas, who co-owns the firm where Patterson works. What is different today, he said, is the ease with which transactions can be conducted through the Internet.

“Moreso in the last couple years… a lot of real estate businesses have gone online,” Samonas said.

At the same time, he said the ease with which scammers can acquire information has impacted their field. That’s why he said it was important that Patterson got the supposed landowner of the Gingerbread Lane property on the phone and sought verification.

“For us to do a little bit of due diligence… that allows us to protect, again, the general public as well as the consumer,” Samonas said. “We like to ensure that we’re keeping our heads on a swivel.”

Some victims of the scam have found that not all Realtors are doing that due diligence.

Mark Lobello, who lives in Winchester, Massachusetts, thought he had addressed an attempt to sell his family’s property on Binnacle Lane in Kennebunk after talking to two Realtors who got calls about selling the land. The scammer had told both Realtors they were in Texas, dealing with cancer and needed to sell the property quickly.

Those were not the last Realtors the scammer would call with the same story, however. When Lobello later visited Kennebunk to check on his family’s land, he turned the corner onto Binnacle Lane and saw a “for sale” sign right in front of his property.

The land in that neighborhood is valuable, according to Lobello. He said he got in early on the sale of the land from a developer, buying it for $350,000. Multimillion-dollar homes have since gone up around his land, he said, and he has since received offers for up to $800,000.

Lobello, standing at his property, called the number on the for-sale sign. He said he asked the Realtor if he had just listed the property. The Realtor replied yes with a tone Labello took to mean excitement for already receiving a call about the listing.

“I said, ‘Great, well that’s my land, and it’s not for sale,’” Lobello revealed.

The Realtor who answered said he had been convinced the scammer was Mark Lobello through a fake driver’s license sent through the Internet. The license included a fake driver’s license number, but it had all of Lobello’s easily discovered public information.

The scammer had the property listed at $500,000. The Realtor agreed to take down the listing, according to Lobello, and Lobello has since been in touch with King and Maine’s assistant attorney general.

“The recourse is scary,” Lobello said. “If that didn’t happen to me and the land had sold, I basically would just be suing everybody.”

New rules for Airbnb and Vrbo rentals? York short-term rental ordinance on the ballot

Authorities, lawmakers hope to bolster protection against deed fraud

King said one of the challenges with investigating deed fraud is how quickly the money can be transferred from the country through different bank accounts. He also said county registers of deeds are not authorized to remove recorded deeds or alter any official record, so one must legally overwrite the fraudulent transaction. That would take an order from the court, he said.

King said law enforcement considered sting operations to catch seller impersonators but that they can be dangerous. He said one Realtor recently worked with authorities to try and communicate with a seller through email. The sting was called off when it was determined the impersonator was communicating from a country where many cybercrimes occur and computer viruses originate.

“I couldn’t obviously have a private company take that chance,” King said. “So, we shut it down.”

State Sen. Henry Ingwersen, a York County Democrat representing Arundel, Biddeford, Dayton, Hollis, and Lyman, is working to pass legislation to protect landowners from criminals using their identities to sell their land and then make off with the profits. He said his bill would establish a commission to study ways of preventing deed fraud, and the bill has survived the Joint Standing Judicial Committee. It still must go before both the House and the Senate.

Ingwersen said he was alerted to the concern about deed fraud by King in December. He said he had never heard of the crime and recognized the complexity of regulating land transfers to prevent it. He was surprised deed transfers could be completed without in-person interaction, but he acknowledged allowing such would help people out of state or overseas.

“I just think we have to figure out ways to make sure that people’s identities are who they say they are,” Ingwersen said. “These days, with the digital age, you can pretty much falsify any document you want.”

Realtors like Samonas and Patterson said the broker’s office can always take measures to prevent a fraudulent sale. They said it just takes pushing scammers to verify they truly own the property before putting the land on the market.

“Part of our job is to take a pause and look at the big picture,” Patterson said. “Not jumping the gun and putting the sign in the front yard.”

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: York County sheriff: Scammers selling homes that aren’t theirs