Posted by mecredis 3 days ago
Surely you meant "'Benenson' without the “b” in the email, and the hyphenated 'out-look.com' domain"?
(ETA: Another one: referring to "hi good morning" in the images of texts when it's actually "hi <name> good evening").
(No I'm not looking at that em-dash)
I suspect that the speculators are scammers anyway: they never respond to my questions.
I still receive occasional postcards from real estate mogul wannabes for a property out in Colorado (I'm in PA). The previous owners of our house moved to Colorado after they sold us their house, and I assume their name is linked to our address in some gray-market/online DB. Why they wouldn't just send purchase offers direct to the house in CO instead of what they think is the owner's primary address (ours) I don't know, but I'm sure they fire off thousands of these things and don't really care how many are accurate.
Put up a big "This property is not for sale" sign on the land.
The first realtor to walk the land would have noticed that sign in a hurry, I figure.
For registry titles you can also add caveats, that require sign-off from another party before transactions can occur. Unfortunately the contact address is still purely snail mail, no email or phone numbers. If you title has a bank mortgage that will appear as a caveat, requiring the debt to be discharged before it can be removed, and that also involves more ID verification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title
https://www.firstlinks.com.au/why-our-torrens-title-property...
Your vacant land could have signs which state that it is not for sale; any online listing is a scam.
It could be something small but easily spotted by a real estate agent or other interested party actually visiting the site, but not so obvious or legible in pictures.
None of this scam requires the scammer to be in the U.S.
Even the New York driver's license, even if it is real, could be muled. More likely it is just a photoshop.
And even if they do show up to the meet, what are you going to do? Call the police? Will they even show up quickly? When they do, whose photo ID will the believe? Seems like a good way to spend a night at the station while the police sort some things out.
Also I'm sure glad that scammer didn't manage to buy that cannon!
Here's another I remember reading recently. I feel sorry for both parties and not sure how I think that should be adjudicated...
https://www.businessinsider.com/property-fraud-lawsuit-fairf...