Trawling for Marks
Here's how a typical home-equity heist goes down: A thief will look for elderly homeowners who have only a few years left on their mortgages or have paid off their mortgages.
''They drive down a neighborhood in a community subdivision, where homes are $250,000 or higher, they see an elderly person and write down the address of the home,'' says Frank Abagnale, who's identity-stealing ways were chronicled in the recent film ''Catch Me If You Can.'' He's now a spokesman for Digital ProtectionPlusSM, an identity-theft protection service in Norwalk, Conn. Next, he says, the scammer heads online, checking public records and local tax databases to learn all he can about the homeowner and the property.
Sometimes, the scammer will do some in-person reconnaissance himself, by ''knocking on the door of the elderly victim and claiming to be a local real-estate agent working in the neighborhood,'' says Jay Foley, co-executive director of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego. The con artist will then proceed to ask prying questions about the value of the home and whether the owner still holds a mortgage.
Once he has harvested all the information about the victim he can get, the thief creates fraudulent documentation and then applies for a home-equity loan in the victim's name.
In extreme scams, Mr. Foley, president of Mortgage Asset Research Institute Inc. in Reston, Va., which follows fraud for the industry says, thieves are so bold they use the information to sell your own home right out from under you. How? Typically, in this type of scam, the supposed buyer and seller are part of the fraud. One ID thief, posing as a homebuyer, applies for a mortgage to buy a home from the home seller, also an ID thief. The ''seller'' then splits the mortgage money with the ''buyer'' and both vanish.
This Information was taken from an article on AOL located at:
http://aolsvc.aol.com/pf/articles/6/article.adp
Thought you might find it interesting.
By Steve
Here's how a typical home-equity heist goes down: A thief will look for elderly homeowners who have only a few years left on their mortgages or have paid off their mortgages.
''They drive down a neighborhood in a community subdivision, where homes are $250,000 or higher, they see an elderly person and write down the address of the home,'' says Frank Abagnale, who's identity-stealing ways were chronicled in the recent film ''Catch Me If You Can.'' He's now a spokesman for Digital ProtectionPlusSM, an identity-theft protection service in Norwalk, Conn. Next, he says, the scammer heads online, checking public records and local tax databases to learn all he can about the homeowner and the property.
Sometimes, the scammer will do some in-person reconnaissance himself, by ''knocking on the door of the elderly victim and claiming to be a local real-estate agent working in the neighborhood,'' says Jay Foley, co-executive director of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego. The con artist will then proceed to ask prying questions about the value of the home and whether the owner still holds a mortgage.
Once he has harvested all the information about the victim he can get, the thief creates fraudulent documentation and then applies for a home-equity loan in the victim's name.
In extreme scams, Mr. Foley, president of Mortgage Asset Research Institute Inc. in Reston, Va., which follows fraud for the industry says, thieves are so bold they use the information to sell your own home right out from under you. How? Typically, in this type of scam, the supposed buyer and seller are part of the fraud. One ID thief, posing as a homebuyer, applies for a mortgage to buy a home from the home seller, also an ID thief. The ''seller'' then splits the mortgage money with the ''buyer'' and both vanish.
This Information was taken from an article on AOL located at:
http://aolsvc.aol.com/pf/articles/6/article.adp
Thought you might find it interesting.
By Steve
