[emptybits]

1. Author lost me at his first sentence: "Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life." I am careful and aware of this possibility, but AFAIK I have not experienced this, nor have "most people" I know. o_O Crazy times.

2. I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere? i.e. Torrens-style

[eszed]

I'm equally careful and aware. Years ago, now, I discovered that someone in New Mexico (if I recall correctly) was working under my Social Security number. That was likely someone not authorized to work in the US writing random digits on an I9 form. No amount of care will protect against that.

It wasn't easy to clear up, either. I'm fortunate that a close friend worked (at the time) for the SS administration, and was able to do basically all of the leg-work for me: I just had to sign a few forms he sent me. Someone not equally connected would have had a much harder time.

I'm also painfully aware that effectively every scrap of everyone's personal data has been repeatedly leaked online. I doubt that any amount of care has much to do with whether or not I'll be targeted at some point in the future.

[WarmWash]

>That was likely someone not authorized to work in the US writing random digits on an I9 form.

I used to work a job years ago with lots of people who snuck in here. In order to get the job they needed to provide a social. Not having any idea wtf a social security number was, just that they needed one, it was a relief when someone they lived with or met on the street informed them that xyz at location abc will sell you one for $100.

That's one spot where the identity theft rubber meets the road. And practically everyone's social has been leaked by now.

[m463]

I remember a friend's boyfriend lost his wallet in mexico.

she said the next few years he got many tax returns, apparently several people using his legitimate ssn.

[plagiarist]

I'm surprised I haven't had more problems with identity theft. Equifax handed all our financial information to criminals a decade ago. Then last year the US government handed all our financial information to a con man.

[talloaktrees]

does that mean someone was paying into your social security, essentially boosting your benefit amount when the time comes?

[b112]

Social security numbers are not unique. In the old days, mistakes would happen, and some people would get the same one.

This person could have been an illegal, but there is a non-zero chance you just both had the same one. It does happen, or at least did.

[madcaptenor]

And writing random digits has about a one-in-three chance of being a hit.

[kstrauser]

In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant and have them disappear with it for a few minutes, about once a year my bank would call me to ask if I'd been using my card in some far-off locale:

"Hi! Are you in Tijuana?"

"Not since 1993. Why? What's up?"

"So you didn't just try to buy gasoline at a PEMEX there?"

"Nope, I'm in San Francisco as speak."

"OK, thanks! We'll get a new card out in the mail to you."

That's a pretty low bar for identity theft, but I think it's defensible.

[happyopossum]

I’ve been using debit and credit cards since long before the ‘dark old days’ ended (1992? 1993? Long before debit cards were a common thing), and I still hand my card to anyone who needs it to do their job. I’ve had identity theft happen a grand total of never.

Anecdotes are worthless.

[m463]

I think tap-to-pay terminals that the server carries now eliminate more of this. but occasionally I have to give my card over.

On the other hand, stolen credit cards were kept by the restaurant and they got a reward.

Nowadays I don't think there is ANY checking of whose card is being used.

[recursive]

You must have been going to some very shady restaurants. I still hand off my credit card to a rando. I did it today. I did it last weekend. I've never had this problem.

[Hardwired8976]

Handing your credit card to pay is still such a foreign concept to me

[b00ty4breakfast]

I've been using a debit card since the Dubya administration and I have never had someone use my card after I ate at a restaurant. I assume you live in a big metro area?

[consp]

Reminds me of the carbon copies (actual carbon copies) some local car renter made. They wrote your risk on the carbon copy as a "reservation", carbon copied your CC onto it and stored it in a safe. Pretty much a list of ready-to-use cards if you got hold of them.

[bookofjoe]

Remember when credit cards required your signature on the back?

[jjmarr]

Unlike most common law jurisdictions, the United States doesn't have a central land registry due to lobbying from the title insurance industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#United_States

[dcrazy]

No, the United States doesnt have a central land registry because that is not an enumerated power of the federal government. The individual states have sovereignty over their own land and each has its own system for land registration. The article you linked to even names several states that have a partial Torrens title system.

The claim that the title insurance industry is the reason for lack of adoption of Torrens title schemes is uncited, and immediately followed by descriptions of several cases where Torrens title was adopted (often poorly) and later abandoned.

[throw0101a]

> Unlike most common law jurisdictions, the United States doesn't have a central land registry due to lobbying from the title insurance industry.

These scammers will either (a) start with a stolen identity and see what land that person owns and try to sell it, or (b) find an interesting piece of land and steal that person's identity and pretend to be them.

In either case a 'definitive' database (or lack thereof) is not the problem.

Ontario and BC (e.g.) in Canada have a land registry:

* https://www.ontario.ca/page/overview-land-registry

* https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/real-esta...

That hasn't stopped fraud (attempts):

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/three-charged-stolen-...

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64547396

[nine_k]

I wonder why a commercial entity that registers ownership / titles for free, and bills for checking, did not spring up. Clearly there is moneyed demand for certainty about title rights, and if you can provide certainty (because the last deal was registered with you), it may be a more desirable product than mere insurance.

[ryandrake]

Yet another example where "we can't have nice things" because entrenched businesses profit from keeping things not-nice. Title Insurance shouldn't even be a thing. This should be solvable by a database.

[jerf]

For identity theft, I think at this point it depends on where you set the bar. I've never had someone clean out my checking account or anything truly large, but my wife and I have had fraudulent charges on our credit cards several times as they've been leaked out one way or another. I would not "identify" as a "identity theft victim" per se if you asked me out of the blue, because compared to some of what I've heard about, I've had nothing more than minor annoyances come out of this. But yeah, I'd guess that it's fair to say that at this point most people have had at least some sort of identity-related issue at some point.

[happyopossum]

> Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere?

As with most things both law-related and US-related, it depends. This type of scam would not work in the majority of states due to various laws, regulations, and bookkeeping (it would be nearly* impossible to sell land you don’t own in California for example).

There are other states (and countries - I’m looking at you Canada) where fraudulent documentation and virtually non-existent title checks allow this kind of fraud to persist.

[*] yes - virtually, not completely. It can happen, but the laws are set up such that the land owner will retain their land, the title fraud victim will be made whole financially by a title insurance company. What this means in practice is that title insurance companies make sure every transaction is legitimate and people don’t have to worry about it.

[rtpg]

Though I think there's way less of this issue in Japan because there are a lot of gov't-involving procedures and record ownership in land ownership transfers making it quite hard to go all the way(and hey, even in the US you have title insurance), there was a bit of a wild case a couple years back where a fraudster sold a 5.5 billion yen piece of land to a major developer[0].

Fraud is always fun to look at because people are constantly looking for those little windows of trust that end up forming in these flows because otherwise everything would take months to execute upon.

[0]:https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181121/p2a/00m/0na/00...

[a2tech]

So the scam here doesn't seem to be ACTUALLY selling the land--it's basically engaging a realtor long enough to get earnest money on the table, then to disappear. Although if they could go far enough to get an entire amount wired to them I'm sure they'd take it.

Since a lot of people are doing all cash (non-financed) deals lately, I could see how a scammer and a lax realtor could possibly scam an overzealous buyer out of the full amount.

[x0x0]

They're not trying to transfer ownership. They're trying to scam people out of the earnest money before a title search (ie ownership verification) happens.

Titles are very decentralized; they are likely modestly-competently managed at the county level, of which there up to 254 per state (Texas).

And identity theft is also very easy in the US. It happened to an old in my family. The state dmv happily mailed a replacement license to a completely different state without so much as checking with the person whose license it is. Just for the asking. It's absurd.

[the_fall]

Different people understand "theft of identity" in different ways. If someone is impersonating you on the internet, or steals your credit card info and makes purchases on your behalf, that probably qualifies.

As for the nature of the scam, there are different levels of this. Most likely, the mark is the buyer / the escrow agency.

[NoSalt]

I have had my identity stolen [at least] three times in the last 15 years:

* OPM Hack

* Target Hack

* Equifax Hack

I say "at least" because there have been more, but I just started ignoring them after a while. I also had it stolen back in the late 1990s; and, thinking back, that was crazy for that time period.

[Lerc]

I once had a visit from cops about dodgy cheques I had been writing. Weirdly they were more ready to believe I hadn't written the cheques, than the were about me not leaving my chequebook at a brothel I hadn't visited.

The last time I wrote a cheque I had to cross out the 19 to write in the year. I think they only gave up on that line of questioning when I provided enough evidence to say that the bank had not given me any chequebooks to lose.

I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people. I'm guessing it counts as identity theft.

Identity theft is not helped by processes that demand certainty and expediency causing pressure on employees to provide both even when they are not available. In a similar credit card issue with my partner, after all of the mess of departments trying to make it other departments' problems, my partner received an email saying that; in accordance with the phone conversation, the issue had been resolved. Having had no such phone conversation this caused a bit of panic, but upon contacting the bank they said that they had tried calling but there was no answer, but they were not allowed to resolve the issue unless they had directly spoken to the customer, so she just wrote that in, otherwise it would keep on causing problems down the line.

On the other hand I have leveraged such processes to my advantage to essentially steal my own identity. For a long time I possessed no photo-id, It was actually buying a house that proved to be the intractable problem that forced me to get a passport (I also wanted to travel) . There were numerous things that required photo ID to exist even if they had not laid eyes on it themselves. It seems rather odd to me, but somehow just the idea that I have it seems enough. Luckily I was once in a situation where I needed photo ID at a time when there was sufficient context to prove my identity by other means. A staff member fudged the system to make it work. That resulted in me acquiring a form of non-photo ID that had been recorded as being verified by photo ID. I leveraged that as a form of pseudo proof-of-photo-id for a number of years.

[Marsymars]

> I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people.

You can order legit cheques online from third party cheque printers to save money vs what banks charge for cheques, you don't need any insider access to get cheques printed.

[bsder]

> I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership.

Centralized vs decentralized isn't relevant.

The issue is that nobody wants to have one of the icky humans in the loop because they have the temerity to ask to be paid a salary.

Consequently, everybody tries to set up systems where everything can be done online with no in-person interactions ever required. This works, sorta, until the fraudsters start figuring out the seams.

But because you would have to give some icky human cash, everybody is fighting tooth and nail to revert back to having any humans moderating the problems.

The correct solution is to call this kind of thing what it is--fraud--and treat it as such. And the proper point for the liability are the companies and agencies that do nothing to prevent the fraud and not all the poor slobs.

A couple of nice big payouts where banks or agencies have to cough up to make everybody whole due to their negligence and suddenly all the systems will get much more stringent.

[brightball]

I have heard of title theft but I imagine it is more prominent is areas where an attorney is not required to process the sale of a house. Some states allow "title companies" to handle this process.

I'm not well versed, just passing along what I've heard from people over the years.

I have always heard the best way to make sure your title can't be stolen is to have a loan against the house so that a bank is involved. As long as a bank is involved, there are numerous additional hoops for something like that.

[dclowd9901]

If you broaden the definition of "stolen identity" to "someone trying to scam either you or someone else by using details on your identity" (which this story more or less is) I think a fair many of us can claim this experience.

[rwmj]

I also wondered why someone would own an empty lot in another town for years on end and neither build on it nor sell it.

[rationalist]

They inheritted it and have been lazy, they bought it for an investment, they bought it because they might want to build their retirement home on it, etc. Plenty of reasons why.

[bluGill]

I know people who have bought the land they want to retire on now. (if they will or not is a different question, but that is the current plan). I know people who own hunting land that they visit one weekend a year. There are people who own land to lease to a local farmer - many farmers have too much money tied up in land and want to lease some of it from someone else to spread the risks.

If the land is expensive you wouldn't let it sit, but there is a lot of land that isn't very valuable that you can just own if you feel like it.

[Marsymars]

I grew up on a big property and when my parents moved, they divided the land and sold the part with the house with the idea that they might build a house on the empty land upon retirement.

I'm guessing at this point that they're not going to do that, so at some point I'll probably inherit some empty land.

[jandrewrogers]

Optionality. There is also a lot of cheap land in the US, so it often isn't a large investment.

[emptybits]

See I can understand this. e.g. a family asset for children, a property to build a retirement home on, a hunting property, or simply a real investment.

[buildsjets]

Buy low, sell high.

[eduction]

So you’re from a different country from the author and don’t know how systems work here but you’re going to judge them for having their identity stolen? Maybe if you actually had any first hand experience you’d be able to muster some empathy. Yea things are decentralized here because we have 50 different states, many more counties, and health insurance is through a mish mash of many insurers and health providers. We are all regularly asked for the exact information needed to steal identity for basic stuff. I got a new dentist last month who has my date of birth, ssn, and home address. I’m going to tell him to stuff it and find a better dentist by, what? Calling around and asking if they require an ssn?

I have also never been the victim of identity theft but if you live here you would know luck plays a major role, always.

If you want to marinate in the superiority of you home country you are welcome to. Maybe don’t post on foreign message boards then.

[eduction]

Update - just tonight got a letter from a company called Conduent disclosing my medical billing records were compromised more than a year ago. Offering me “free” credit monitoring.