Looks like they got the house "thief"

[John Rumm]

[williamwright]

Good. He should be severely punished for causing all that upset.

Bill

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

glad they got the bastard ...

[newshound]

I'm sure we all had sleepless nights over it.

[Andrew]

With a suspended sentence ?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Andrew used his keyboard to write :

They hanged him??? :')

[williamwright]

I think a lot of people did. I know someone who owns a house that is presently unoccupied and it worried them a lot.

Bill

[Tim Lamb]

Land Registry have a system to notify you if any attempts are made to change details. You have to sign up for it.

My daughter is currently failing to get them to accept her parents home address for registration and mail regarding some farmland.

[pinnerite]

I only learned about this on Tuesday but found it hard to find. Eventually I did. This mioght help others:

Alan

[williamwright]

Yes I've done it and so have my friends.

Bill

[williamwright]

It's easy peasy.

Bill

[Andy Burns]

provided the house, or land *is* registered to start with.

[Alan J. Wylie]

I had a notification yesterday, not for my property but for a huge neighbouring area. It's just "Land at ... Road, <Town>". It seems that there was a huge development about 100 years ago (the houses appear on the 1933 OS map, but not on the 1919 one[1]) and a large number of the properties, including my next door neighbour's have not yet had their individual boundaries registered.

[1]

[Andy Burns]

My parents house, built 1968 isn't registered.

[GB]

Curiously, that means they have far less to worry about.

1. Unregistered land is far harder to deal with. Forging the deeds would be a major job.
2. The new 'owners' might not get good title. Ordinarily, the buyer of stolen goods doesn't get good title. It's because of the legislation founding the Land Registry that transferees of registered land get good title even if the transfer is fraudulent.
3. This particular fraud is almost impossible to do if the owners are in occupation of their home, anyway.

[John Rumm]

From what I have read so far it seems the stolen house also had unregistered deeds, and they seemed to allow the transfer of ownership without them.

(not sure how difficult forging plausible looking deeds would be. The few paper examples I have seen did not appear to have much in the way of security measures)

Alas in this specific case they now have good title. The thing that makes the situation here different, is that the final arbiter of who owns a property is who is listed on the Land Registry's database. So if you can con your way into getting listed as the owner there, then you legally are the owner, since it is that record that defines ownership.

Indeed, in most cases it would be the buyer that would lose out, since they would be buying something for which the seller did not have legal title.

Yup.

Also harder if it is mortgaged...

In reality it ought to have been impossible in the case of the Vicar's place, but there seems to have been a cascade of failures from the DVLA, the estate agents, the conveyancing solicitors, and the bank that allowed it to slip through the net.

[GB]

The perpetrator seems to have had to produce ID with a proper likeness of himself. This was then copied by the conveyancer. I've heard it said that the vicar immediately recognised the guy. (It might even be true!)

[Andy Burns]

Unfortunately, it's unoccupied.

I has a £1 mortgage balance on a "natural redemption" scheme, two years ago the B/S knew they had the deeds, this year they seem somewhat shy to say anything about them ...

[Peter Johnson]

But banks/building societies don't care about deeds of registered properties these days. A few years ago Santander had a clearout of their deeds room and sent me the papers they had relevant to my house, while it was still mortgaged, because they didn't want them any more. Wasn't much of interest because it was built in 1988 and registered from new.

[John Rumm]

I suppose if the victim was known by the perp, then that makes the impersonation more credible, since they would have likely known more low level background stuff that would help the scam seem more plausible.

However it seems surprising that that a fraudster smart enough to carry out a scam that sophisticated would also be dumb enough to target someone who could identify him from a photo (knowing that the estate agents etc will keep a copy of his ID documents)