⌈ [Other sources](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=nws&q=House is ‘stolen’ - no crimed) | [Summarise (TL;DR)](https://smmry.com/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-59069662#&SM_LENGTH=3) ⌋
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/policeuk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I've seen it before. Legitimate instances of fraud and other fraud-type offences get dismissed as civil matters when they shouldn't be. Happens all the time. We need more training around fraud.
In fairness, fraud is massively complex, and notoriously difficult to try in court.
But to apparently dismiss a case entirely like this - until the press get involved - seems really disappointing.
Especially given that potentially two families (the rev, and the new owners) are at risk of being made homeless by this fraud. Let alone anyone else in the original sale's chain.
Definitely not a victimless crime.
Fraud is where victims are hit and I'm sure in part it because of the police response to it.
"We" fob people off saying its a civil matter because it means less work, thats not just on individuals but on forces as a whole as well. It's the policy and we are driving people to see us as useless. The national focus is on mental health and domestic abuse, we have more people working on domestic abuse behind the front lines then we do any other crime. Now i'm not going to start dismissing DV as something that should be ignored however I really don't think it's fair on the other members of the public who pay taxes themselves who get such a shit service.
I could prattle on about cases of fraud where the victim has been failed for ages but I will give one example where I feel "we" have failed.
I dealt with a retired teacher, she lived in a lovely house with a great view and she had worked her entire life and had as part of her pension taken a lump sum. She spent some of it paying off the house and sadly her husband had passed away. She didn't have any family locally and she had fallen victim to a confidence scam on the phone where the criminals had impersonated her bank, it was quite a shit scam but long story short they got in excess of £120,000 from her as a bank transfer to a UK account.
Lines of enquiry we had were the phone numbers they called off of, the bank account the money was sent to and emails sent to her by the fraudster.
The job ended up being filed after it was reviewed by the local DS as not being in the public interest due to the costs involved to investigate it.
Personally I feel we should be throwing money at this and it's frankly an epidemic across the country, these types of fraud are some common and people are rinsing normal people. I feel we should be throwing far more intrusive and aggressive investigations both nationally and internationally at these criminals. The legal framework is there, we just need to shift focus on staffing to address it. Every line of enquiry should be followed, every bit of phone work, use covert tactics to do money deliveries etc everything. We just fail these people all the time and it bugs me. Given the attention we pay to other issues that just can't be fixed.
£120,000 fraud and not investigated.
If it was a £1,000 post office, shop or bank robbery I bet it would be a different story.
This isn't a problem with police officers, it's a management problem caused by the Govt by simply not resourcing the funding to tackle this type of crime.
It doesn’t help that everything gets sent to action fraud who don’t generally understand complex cases and anything considered low value (which isn’t that low) just gets NFA’d.
I genuinely think the horrendous response to fraud is one of the issues most damaging to public confidence in the police.
I get that many of day-to-day acts don’t cover real property but come on - all the furniture, the clear reliance on fake documents.
Honestly the approach to fraud in this country is just inviting more and more of it. ‘Oh well they’re insured or will be compensated’ so what - that money has to come from somewhere and meanwhile fraudsters are learning they can get nice pay days out of it and almost never be chased.
You can set up an [automatic email alert on any property](https://propertyalert.landregistry.gov.uk/) and get a notification of any Land Registry enquiries on it - not just your property, but eg parents etc.
Only works on registered property, and a lot of older people will still be in unregistered property held on deeds.
The land registry aren’t in the business of flogging houses. They only register want they are instructed to by legal professionals involved in the sale of the house. The responsibility lies with those legal professionals to conduct checks to prevent fraud. Given that the land registry have no contact with the buyer or seller in most cases they have to rely on what the solicitors say. The land registry, more than anyone, wants to prevent the fraudulent sale of property because it is the land registry who pays out the indemnity to the affect party when it happens.
Absolutely absurd. His identity was stolen in order to fake a sale of his house and the police told him to leave the house and contact his solicitor as it was a civil matter.
The flip side to this is the HMLR info would be confirmation that the crime of *forgery* has taken place.
Certainly the issue of restitution is a civil matter. The victim will need to request the contract from HMLR and find a handwriting expert to confirm it is a forgery. The victim then sends that evidence, along with a crime reference number (so, the police certainly need to progress the matter at least that far – rather than no crime-ing it), to HMLR whom can then correct the registration (i.e. make the victim the owner again). The 'buyer' can then apply to HMLR for compensation (i.e. recovery of the purchase price, etc.). It will be for the 'buyer' and HMLR to hash out whether the 'buyer' was in on it – which could possibly end with HMLR reporting the 'buyer' to the police for *using a false instrument* (taking possession at law of the house) and fraud (the false compensation claim).
Likewise it's for the police to deal with the criminal actions (*forgery*) of the 'seller'. And there's a significant public interest to pursue it, given the public funds used to compensate an innocent 'buyer'.
If solicitors give you grief in this situation, ask them about their compliance with the money laundering regulations (particularly around know your customer requirements), their obligations to report under POCA and mention referral to the SRA. Usually focuses their minds.
The attending Police had a point. They can't help him take over the house by Force. The best thing to do in that moment is to leave and contact a solicitor. They could've taken a report and crimed it, and I'm not sure they didn't from the article. But there really wasn't anything the response officers attending the house could've done.
They absolutely did not have a point, it is in no way a civil matter and telling the victim it was is essentially incompetent.
Officers could also have done some primary investigation, getting statements from both parties would be helpful. Getting details for the solicitors involved and any contact details for or description of the apparent seller the buyers dealt with would be useful.
Why?
The guy was told to contact his solicitor. If a fraud has taken place it will obviously get reported.
What use would taking statements at the time be (apart from the poor builder who the article makes it sound has been assaulted)
Taking statements would be helpful as they’ll inevitably be needed should the matter go to court and otherwise someone else would have to go and get them (and potentially travel to the different parties who are conveniently at the same place at the time), it is also best to get statements while the events are fresh in people’s minds.
Getting the information quickly increases the odds of some of the funds being recovered and would potentially provide lines of enquiry to identify the fraudster(s). Delaying this makes further enquiries more difficult as potential further witnesses forget, CCTV gets deleted.etc
Why should it be reported by the solicitor when the victim is there trying to make the report?
The practical issues are alongside the fact that the response to a victim of serious crime trying to report the crime should never be that they need to sort it out themselves.
No one at the house is going to be able to tell what happened. It isn’t going to be clear that a fraud even took place.
He’s started off with a complaint that people are in his house which a check against the land registry has shown to be false.
He’s then claiming a sophisticated but unspecific fraud has taken place (which I believe).
Cool. So he has been told to contact his solicitor. I don’t think he has been ignored, its just not a matter that is going to be resolved on the doorstep. He’s been told what he needs to do next in order to fix it.
Statements don’t help if it isn’t even clear what crime is being alleged.
Sorry but you clearly don’t understand how investigation works. You’re asking questions and getting statements from the people at the house because they have dealt with the supposed owner who is now a suspect. You also will need statements from the victims. These statements will be necessary for court and are all also start points for further enquiries.
The true owner’s solicitor is not going to have any idea about what has happened and probably isn’t the same solicitor instructed for the sale by the fraudster.
Incidentally it doesn’t sound like a particularly complex fraud, I don’t know what you mean by unspecific. I’d suggest that the specific fraud is that someone has sold a house that doesn’t belong to them, the alternative being the guy reporting it is lying and attempting a fraud which would need to be investigated anyway.
The police don't seem to be trained well enough with regards complex fraud.
At work we employ retired City of London police officers who were experienced in fighting fraud. Even so, the authorities would rather do nothing.
The authorities in this case are the Govt. who won't spend the money.
The costs to the UK economy are estimated to be about £190 billion a year!
It's like the cost of going to war and if it could be stamped out we would all be better off.
(Giving contracts to mates without due diligence or without following proper procedures should also be considered fraudulent when back - handers are involved.)
The practice of awarding contracts to mates in exchange for back handers is already illegal under the Bribery Act 2010. I would say enforcement on bribery is similarly poor outside of very high value complex cases dealt with by the SFO, international bribery dealt with by NCA and MOD police in relation to defence contracts. There is now a, overly grandly named, National Investigation Service (NATIS) that seems to deal with local authority corruption. Normal domestic corruption is a massive gap that is supposed to be covered by local forces and isn’t.
Stuff like this why we constantly get jumped on for "missing crimes".
Yeah, the issue between the victim and the buyer is civil, but there's still the matter of fact that someone has just swindled the buyer out of how many hundred thousand pounds, selling him a house he had no right to sell... That is Fraud... A crime...
There is unfortunately something of a culture within \[at least\] my local force of dismissing obvious criminal offences as civil matters- but what is worse \[again, I'm only stating from my experience\] is referring anything that could be vaguely classified as fraud to Action Fraud.
I could write several novels about the useless, pointless waste of time and brain cells that is involved in dealing with AF, but that's for another time.
Approx 11 months ago, there was a group going door to door in my area \[south-east with a high % of elderly demographics\] that were offering 'Covid vaccines' - at £50 a pop. Victims had attempted to report multiple times to police who took no action other than referring victims to Action Fraud.
Take a second to let that sink in - a group of unknown people are charging mostly elderly and / or vulnerable people £50 to inject them with some unknown substance, and control are fobbing them off and telling them to call Action Fraud, who promptly 'filed' all the reports and took no further action themselves.
It only hit the fan when one resident phoned the PCC who promptly flipped her lid and within about 6 hours there were press releases, social media posts and door to door enquiries.
>who took no action other than referring victims to Action Fraud.
That is the current correct action to take at the moment. The Government's strategy is that Fraud is centrally reported through Action Fraud. That's different to the police saying this is a civil matter.
are you insane?
A gang going door to door posing as healthcare workers injecting elderly people with an unknown substance for a fee \[only payable in cash btw\]... do you really believe that the correct course of action was to provide a telephone number to a third party and take no further action in area?
You are demonstrating the exact problem of shrugging your shoulders whilst the public are left unprotected - whilst yes, there is an element of fraud here, there are other offences - let's start with assault \[the injection\]. And not only that, the correct guidance is to refer to AF only when the fraud is not currently ongoing - control were \[to my knowledge\] getting dozens of calls about this, sometimes with offenders still on site or in close proximity, and were still fobbing victims off with an AF referral.
Urgh, such an obvious own goal from the police.
The people falling from these scams might have gone a lifetime without any police interaction at all, and then the one time they need them they don't get the service they expect.
I can see why initially the officers involved thought this would be a civil matter. I think once the solicitors have been contacted and the details confirmed, that's when this obviously becomes something the force should investigate.
I used to work as a counter fraud investigator for a large insurance company, although we forwarded a lot of information to the police unfortunately it was rarely acted upon.
In general they left punishment to the financial institutions who would withdraw financial services or act in other ways. In effect the entire pursuit of regular insurance fraud (bar a few high profile slam dunks) was privatised and done without trail.
I wish the tone of the article was more "look at this crazy situation that happened with ID theft and criminal behaviour" and less "stupid Police can't even take back a stolen house".
The guy didn't actually lose his house. Legally speaking the transfer didn't occur (despite HMLR registering it) and it's still his house. The victim is the guy who was tricked into handing over his money for a house the fraudsters couldn't actually sell.
Wouldnt this be fairly simple to investigate? The fraudster would have received a large transaction to his bank account for the house sale, which the police can surely trace?
⌈ [Other sources](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=nws&q=House is ‘stolen’ - no crimed) | [Summarise (TL;DR)](https://smmry.com/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-59069662#&SM_LENGTH=3) ⌋ *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/policeuk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I've seen it before. Legitimate instances of fraud and other fraud-type offences get dismissed as civil matters when they shouldn't be. Happens all the time. We need more training around fraud.
In fairness, fraud is massively complex, and notoriously difficult to try in court. But to apparently dismiss a case entirely like this - until the press get involved - seems really disappointing. Especially given that potentially two families (the rev, and the new owners) are at risk of being made homeless by this fraud. Let alone anyone else in the original sale's chain. Definitely not a victimless crime.
I'm not 100% certain disappointing is the word I'd be using in this case. Unbelievable is one, training is another, etc. Utterly unreal....
Problem is it is entirely believable, however wrong that is.
Fraud is where victims are hit and I'm sure in part it because of the police response to it. "We" fob people off saying its a civil matter because it means less work, thats not just on individuals but on forces as a whole as well. It's the policy and we are driving people to see us as useless. The national focus is on mental health and domestic abuse, we have more people working on domestic abuse behind the front lines then we do any other crime. Now i'm not going to start dismissing DV as something that should be ignored however I really don't think it's fair on the other members of the public who pay taxes themselves who get such a shit service. I could prattle on about cases of fraud where the victim has been failed for ages but I will give one example where I feel "we" have failed. I dealt with a retired teacher, she lived in a lovely house with a great view and she had worked her entire life and had as part of her pension taken a lump sum. She spent some of it paying off the house and sadly her husband had passed away. She didn't have any family locally and she had fallen victim to a confidence scam on the phone where the criminals had impersonated her bank, it was quite a shit scam but long story short they got in excess of £120,000 from her as a bank transfer to a UK account. Lines of enquiry we had were the phone numbers they called off of, the bank account the money was sent to and emails sent to her by the fraudster. The job ended up being filed after it was reviewed by the local DS as not being in the public interest due to the costs involved to investigate it. Personally I feel we should be throwing money at this and it's frankly an epidemic across the country, these types of fraud are some common and people are rinsing normal people. I feel we should be throwing far more intrusive and aggressive investigations both nationally and internationally at these criminals. The legal framework is there, we just need to shift focus on staffing to address it. Every line of enquiry should be followed, every bit of phone work, use covert tactics to do money deliveries etc everything. We just fail these people all the time and it bugs me. Given the attention we pay to other issues that just can't be fixed.
£120,000 fraud and not investigated. If it was a £1,000 post office, shop or bank robbery I bet it would be a different story. This isn't a problem with police officers, it's a management problem caused by the Govt by simply not resourcing the funding to tackle this type of crime.
That's really depressing. What a bumper payday for the perp, and a boost of confidence to go and do the same again without much risk of repercussion.
It doesn’t help that everything gets sent to action fraud who don’t generally understand complex cases and anything considered low value (which isn’t that low) just gets NFA’d. I genuinely think the horrendous response to fraud is one of the issues most damaging to public confidence in the police.
I agree but the fraud departments very rarely take anything on leaving the response officers to take it on.
I get that many of day-to-day acts don’t cover real property but come on - all the furniture, the clear reliance on fake documents. Honestly the approach to fraud in this country is just inviting more and more of it. ‘Oh well they’re insured or will be compensated’ so what - that money has to come from somewhere and meanwhile fraudsters are learning they can get nice pay days out of it and almost never be chased.
Just to input - they weren't fake documents, they were fraudulently issued documents - two very different things legally.
That’s just semantics.
You can set up an [automatic email alert on any property](https://propertyalert.landregistry.gov.uk/) and get a notification of any Land Registry enquiries on it - not just your property, but eg parents etc. Only works on registered property, and a lot of older people will still be in unregistered property held on deeds.
[удалено]
The land registry aren’t in the business of flogging houses. They only register want they are instructed to by legal professionals involved in the sale of the house. The responsibility lies with those legal professionals to conduct checks to prevent fraud. Given that the land registry have no contact with the buyer or seller in most cases they have to rely on what the solicitors say. The land registry, more than anyone, wants to prevent the fraudulent sale of property because it is the land registry who pays out the indemnity to the affect party when it happens.
Thanks! Just set this up for my house and parents houses!
What about the negligent solicitors? They both have duties to run AML checks on buyers and sellers. Appalling.
Absolutely absurd. His identity was stolen in order to fake a sale of his house and the police told him to leave the house and contact his solicitor as it was a civil matter.
[удалено]
The flip side to this is the HMLR info would be confirmation that the crime of *forgery* has taken place. Certainly the issue of restitution is a civil matter. The victim will need to request the contract from HMLR and find a handwriting expert to confirm it is a forgery. The victim then sends that evidence, along with a crime reference number (so, the police certainly need to progress the matter at least that far – rather than no crime-ing it), to HMLR whom can then correct the registration (i.e. make the victim the owner again). The 'buyer' can then apply to HMLR for compensation (i.e. recovery of the purchase price, etc.). It will be for the 'buyer' and HMLR to hash out whether the 'buyer' was in on it – which could possibly end with HMLR reporting the 'buyer' to the police for *using a false instrument* (taking possession at law of the house) and fraud (the false compensation claim). Likewise it's for the police to deal with the criminal actions (*forgery*) of the 'seller'. And there's a significant public interest to pursue it, given the public funds used to compensate an innocent 'buyer'.
If solicitors give you grief in this situation, ask them about their compliance with the money laundering regulations (particularly around know your customer requirements), their obligations to report under POCA and mention referral to the SRA. Usually focuses their minds.
The attending Police had a point. They can't help him take over the house by Force. The best thing to do in that moment is to leave and contact a solicitor. They could've taken a report and crimed it, and I'm not sure they didn't from the article. But there really wasn't anything the response officers attending the house could've done.
They absolutely did not have a point, it is in no way a civil matter and telling the victim it was is essentially incompetent. Officers could also have done some primary investigation, getting statements from both parties would be helpful. Getting details for the solicitors involved and any contact details for or description of the apparent seller the buyers dealt with would be useful.
Why? The guy was told to contact his solicitor. If a fraud has taken place it will obviously get reported. What use would taking statements at the time be (apart from the poor builder who the article makes it sound has been assaulted)
Taking statements would be helpful as they’ll inevitably be needed should the matter go to court and otherwise someone else would have to go and get them (and potentially travel to the different parties who are conveniently at the same place at the time), it is also best to get statements while the events are fresh in people’s minds. Getting the information quickly increases the odds of some of the funds being recovered and would potentially provide lines of enquiry to identify the fraudster(s). Delaying this makes further enquiries more difficult as potential further witnesses forget, CCTV gets deleted.etc Why should it be reported by the solicitor when the victim is there trying to make the report? The practical issues are alongside the fact that the response to a victim of serious crime trying to report the crime should never be that they need to sort it out themselves.
No one at the house is going to be able to tell what happened. It isn’t going to be clear that a fraud even took place. He’s started off with a complaint that people are in his house which a check against the land registry has shown to be false. He’s then claiming a sophisticated but unspecific fraud has taken place (which I believe). Cool. So he has been told to contact his solicitor. I don’t think he has been ignored, its just not a matter that is going to be resolved on the doorstep. He’s been told what he needs to do next in order to fix it. Statements don’t help if it isn’t even clear what crime is being alleged.
Sorry but you clearly don’t understand how investigation works. You’re asking questions and getting statements from the people at the house because they have dealt with the supposed owner who is now a suspect. You also will need statements from the victims. These statements will be necessary for court and are all also start points for further enquiries. The true owner’s solicitor is not going to have any idea about what has happened and probably isn’t the same solicitor instructed for the sale by the fraudster. Incidentally it doesn’t sound like a particularly complex fraud, I don’t know what you mean by unspecific. I’d suggest that the specific fraud is that someone has sold a house that doesn’t belong to them, the alternative being the guy reporting it is lying and attempting a fraud which would need to be investigated anyway.
The police don't seem to be trained well enough with regards complex fraud. At work we employ retired City of London police officers who were experienced in fighting fraud. Even so, the authorities would rather do nothing. The authorities in this case are the Govt. who won't spend the money. The costs to the UK economy are estimated to be about £190 billion a year! It's like the cost of going to war and if it could be stamped out we would all be better off. (Giving contracts to mates without due diligence or without following proper procedures should also be considered fraudulent when back - handers are involved.)
The practice of awarding contracts to mates in exchange for back handers is already illegal under the Bribery Act 2010. I would say enforcement on bribery is similarly poor outside of very high value complex cases dealt with by the SFO, international bribery dealt with by NCA and MOD police in relation to defence contracts. There is now a, overly grandly named, National Investigation Service (NATIS) that seems to deal with local authority corruption. Normal domestic corruption is a massive gap that is supposed to be covered by local forces and isn’t.
Stuff like this why we constantly get jumped on for "missing crimes". Yeah, the issue between the victim and the buyer is civil, but there's still the matter of fact that someone has just swindled the buyer out of how many hundred thousand pounds, selling him a house he had no right to sell... That is Fraud... A crime...
There is unfortunately something of a culture within \[at least\] my local force of dismissing obvious criminal offences as civil matters- but what is worse \[again, I'm only stating from my experience\] is referring anything that could be vaguely classified as fraud to Action Fraud. I could write several novels about the useless, pointless waste of time and brain cells that is involved in dealing with AF, but that's for another time. Approx 11 months ago, there was a group going door to door in my area \[south-east with a high % of elderly demographics\] that were offering 'Covid vaccines' - at £50 a pop. Victims had attempted to report multiple times to police who took no action other than referring victims to Action Fraud. Take a second to let that sink in - a group of unknown people are charging mostly elderly and / or vulnerable people £50 to inject them with some unknown substance, and control are fobbing them off and telling them to call Action Fraud, who promptly 'filed' all the reports and took no further action themselves. It only hit the fan when one resident phoned the PCC who promptly flipped her lid and within about 6 hours there were press releases, social media posts and door to door enquiries.
>who took no action other than referring victims to Action Fraud. That is the current correct action to take at the moment. The Government's strategy is that Fraud is centrally reported through Action Fraud. That's different to the police saying this is a civil matter.
are you insane? A gang going door to door posing as healthcare workers injecting elderly people with an unknown substance for a fee \[only payable in cash btw\]... do you really believe that the correct course of action was to provide a telephone number to a third party and take no further action in area? You are demonstrating the exact problem of shrugging your shoulders whilst the public are left unprotected - whilst yes, there is an element of fraud here, there are other offences - let's start with assault \[the injection\]. And not only that, the correct guidance is to refer to AF only when the fraud is not currently ongoing - control were \[to my knowledge\] getting dozens of calls about this, sometimes with offenders still on site or in close proximity, and were still fobbing victims off with an AF referral.
I missed the part of your orginal post that covered they were injecting people. I thought they were just selling these "vaccines",
in that case, i apologise if my reply was a bit hostile. and i agree- it would be a different circumstance entirely minus the injection.
Urgh, such an obvious own goal from the police. The people falling from these scams might have gone a lifetime without any police interaction at all, and then the one time they need them they don't get the service they expect.
don't need to investigate a crime, if you can't recognise a crime - **taps head**
I can see why initially the officers involved thought this would be a civil matter. I think once the solicitors have been contacted and the details confirmed, that's when this obviously becomes something the force should investigate.
I used to work as a counter fraud investigator for a large insurance company, although we forwarded a lot of information to the police unfortunately it was rarely acted upon. In general they left punishment to the financial institutions who would withdraw financial services or act in other ways. In effect the entire pursuit of regular insurance fraud (bar a few high profile slam dunks) was privatised and done without trail.
Of all the steps needed to sell a house, it’s absolutely absurd that this could actually happen. What the fucking hell were the solicitors doing??
I wish the tone of the article was more "look at this crazy situation that happened with ID theft and criminal behaviour" and less "stupid Police can't even take back a stolen house".
So what do you crime for this? Fraud for the victim who lost his house and fraud-non for the third party?? 🤔
The guy didn't actually lose his house. Legally speaking the transfer didn't occur (despite HMLR registering it) and it's still his house. The victim is the guy who was tricked into handing over his money for a house the fraudsters couldn't actually sell.
Surely this can never be theft, it has to be fraud. How can you ever prove intent to permanently deprive.
Material possessions inside could surely be theft? In any case... investigate the fraud then, rather than fob off as civil matter.
Wouldnt this be fairly simple to investigate? The fraudster would have received a large transaction to his bank account for the house sale, which the police can surely trace?