Another on You and Yours today. Bill won't mention it as it's not a moan about BBC bias.
A single lady was away from her house looking after an ailing mother during Covid.
Someone claiming to be her sister (she doesn't have one) managed to get a genuine power of attorney letter. And instructed a solicitor to sell the house.
Seems there were no checks made on the witnesses etc for the POA. All false.
Luckily, the instructed solicitor smelt a rat.
As was the DOB of the donor. You really couldn't make it up!
Heads should roll at the Office of the Public Guardian - they are simply not fit for purpose if they are prepared to validate such a powerful legal instrument without making even the most basic sanity checks.
Ministry of "Justice" is a monumental failure yet again.
An LPoA allows someone to take complete control of all of your finances and once granted and validated by OPG they have near absolute power. The only saving grace is that some banks are so wilful and obstructive that it might take them a while to make progress with it and they will leave a footprint on security cameras but with masks on indoors again it is the perfect time for this scam to prosper.
A less diligent one might not have - that is the point.
The original document is still in the hands of the scammer and if they manage to find a less diligent solicitor it could still happen again.
A certified LPoA with the OPG stamps on it is an incredibly powerful legal document. They should *NOT* be handing them out like this!
Incompetent and inept doesn't even begin to describe it!
Quite. I can understand individuals being conned, but when it comes to an official agency (or whatever), you'd think they'd at least do basic checks.
If Y&Y can find out the witnesses to the document didn't exist, it should be trivial for a government body to do the same.
The OPG authorisation stamps are a few aligned punched holes. I could easily fake one given a few hours to prepare a suitable punch mask.
The whole damn thing should be entirely online with a one time pass to access the database much like with driving licenses for hire cars. It is beyond f****it stupid that some new graduate drudge in a solicitors office has to stamp and sign every page of a certified paper copy.
The original is far too valuable to ever let out of your sight!
Banks have a bad habit of losing documents. Out of my 3 certified copies of my mothers LPoA I only got 2 of them back. I made the offending bank give me back a certified copy of their scan of the document they lost for sheer devilment value. I wasn't in a forgiving mood at the time.
They didn't get around to fixing the Passport issued in the name of a dead baby until long after "Day of the Jackal" became a best seller.
I seriously think that heads should roll over this. They are incompetent beyond belief to fail to notice that the donors date of birth is wrong! Taking up the witnesses contact details is also unforgivable.
The Office of the Public Guardian is supposed to protect vulnerable individuals but as it stands today they make every one of us a target for sophisticated spear phishing attacks by very smart criminals who can easily outwit the fuckwits in the Ministry of "Justice".
Passport office at least rings up the referee(s) - I know because I do that in my professional capacity and every time they have rung me up and at least done a cursory check that I really do know the individual who I have signed the photograph of. Most of them I have know for 25+ years!
OTOH they could have paid me loads of dosh just to say that.
If the originator is fortunate enough still to have capacity, then they can certify copies themself.
Write the following text on the bottom of every page of the copy: ?I certify this is a true and complete copy of the corresponding page of the original lasting power of attorney.? On the final page of the copy, you must also write: ?I certify this is a true and complete copy of the lasting power of attorney.? You need to sign and date every page."
To avoid having to write out the text repeatedly, I scanned the originals, and edited the .pdf files to achieve what a solicitor would have done with a rubber stamp, so I just had to sign and date after printing them off.
Chris
Getting an 85 year old with severe arthritis of the hands to do that would be a cruel and unusual punishment. When I was dealing with it in the first instance an LPoA was about 25 sheets long some of them with nowhere blank on the page where a solicitors stamp would fit on.
I actually felt sorry for the guy who was doing it for me.
As "Controlled Documents" go LPoA took the biscuit with a random number of Page N of N's attached to the back. Absolutely no way for anyone to ever tell if they were *all* there or some had been removed.
I hope that now it is online input things have improved as far as page numbering is concerned but it would not surprise me if they haven't.
The LPoA is now a bit shorter but the early draft was ludicrously verbose and very badly designed (as you might expect).
Not quite as bad as some of the documents from HMRC for dealing with an estate which contain arcane features of prehistoric Adobe PDF that break most alternative free PDF editors apart from Adobe's own full version and PDF X-Change which was the only one I could find that worked (almost reliably with their bastardised PDF document format).
My advice would be download original Adobe PDF Editor on evaluation and make sure you complete the job inside the allowed 30/60 day window.
It did strike me that, on a form of which authorised copies will routinely have to be made, that they could have at least included a blank space for the overprint in the same place on every page.
Even better, they could have actually printed the required text, and just left the spaces for signature and date.
I had to design mine with quite small text, and even then some pages really didn't have a good clear space to place it.
Chris
I?ve signed a couple of passport applications and have never been contacted.
MNAAW
The Land Registry have a new (to me) register to ensure that the person registered as the owner is notified whenever ayone seeks to make changes. Make a note to register yours:
This is old news.
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