Your identity, money and other information are not the only things being targeted by cyber thieves. Even properties are reportedly being bought and sold by online scammers without the owner’s or buyer’s knowledge.
One victim was a 72-year-old landowner from Metro Detroit, USA. Marvin, an architect, intended to build a dream house on his property in Farmington Hills when he received last November a letter from a title company notifying him that his property had been sold.
Marvin immediately called the title company and informed it that he and his wife’s signature on the papers were fake so the sale was fraudulent.
“The individual that impersonated Marvin communicated by email and text and that helped facilitate the sale of the property digitally,” said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent Brian Stewart, who handled the case, reports wxyz.com.
Fortunately, Marvin was able to get his property back and the buyer his money as the payment didn’t leave the title company’s bank account, allowing HSI to reverse the transaction, according to wxyz.com.
However, Stewart failed to track down the scammers.
In another case, Naussany Investments and Private Lending (NIPL) tried to foreclose on and auction off the most famous American mansion at the Shelby County Chancery Court in Memphis, Tennessee on 23 May.
NIPL had claimed that Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of the late “King of Rock ‘n Roll” Elvis Presley, had borrowed $3.8 million from it and allegedly used the “Graceland” estate as collateral but failed to settle the loan before she died in 2023.
The Presleys’ granddaughter, actress Riley Keough, foiled the sale of Graceland by obtaining a court injunction on 22 May stating that NIPL didn’t exist and had no rights to the property, CNN and Commercial Appeal reported.
The Shelby County Registrar told CNN in an email that NIPL did not have any filings in the county’s Register of Deeds pertaining to Graceland/Elvis Presley.
NIPL has no office except for two postal boxes, an email address and a phone number that is not in service. The media reached out to NIPL by email and it directed them to Gregory Naussany who replied and claimed to be responsible for the foreclosure attempt.
The email was written in a mix of English and Luganda, a language spoken in Uganda. Naussany claimed to be a Nigeria-based scammer who stole identities and the victims were mostly the dead and elderly from California and Florida.
The self-described scammer told CNN they were not always successful in what they did. It could not be verified if he or she was really behind the botched scheme.
WJG @tribunephl_wjg
