FBI warns scammers are impersonating landowners to sell properties to unsuspecting buyers

(NEW YORK) — When a man claiming to own a vacant Randolph, New Jersey, investment property called real estate agent Lisa Shaw last summer, she thought it would be the start of another typical real estate transaction in the Garden State suburbs.

“He said he had this piece of property for over 25 years in Randolph, even though he had never been to Randolph,” Shaw told ABC News. 

She said she asked the man why he wanted to put this land on the market.

“He said, ‘Well, real estate is really high right now.’ He thought he could get the best dollar for it,” Shaw said. “He also told me his wife was ill and he needed the proceeds from that money for his wife’s illness.”

Shaw says she did not realize that not only did the man on the phone not actually own the property in question — but that this one phone call would ultimately connect that vacant lot to an alleged international crime web that authorities say involves fake documents ranging from Canada to Vietnam.

The incident is just the latest example of what the FBI says is a growing and troubling new form of fraud affecting unsuspecting landowners nationwide.

“Who would ever think that somebody would sell your own property from right under your nose, without your knowledge, and be able to dupe the system and everyone involved in that transaction?” Jim Dennehy, assistant director in charge of the FBI for New York, told ABC News Chief Business Correspondent Rebecca Jarvis.

‘No one suspected it’

Shaw, who has been selling properties in and around Randolph for more than two decades, says that after she spoke with the purported property owner, she asked him for documentation.

The man said that he and his wife were Canadian citizens living in England, and he provided a British address and copies of what appeared to be their driver’s licenses from the Canadian province of Ontario.

What Shaw didn’t know was that the property in Randolph was actually owned by a husband and wife from Texas. When the driver’s licenses arrived, they had the names of the real owners — just not their Texas address.

“Everything looked fine,” Shaw said, explaining that she proceeded to put the land up for sale and immediately received around 10 offers.

But the licenses turned out not to be fine. An official with Canada’s Peel Regional Police told ABC News that both identification cards were fake.

Although the licenses contained real addresses in the Toronto area, the owner of the home at one of those addresses told ABC News that she has no idea how her address ended up being listed on the fake identification card, and that she had nothing to do with an attempted property sale in New Jersey. The owner of the home at the British address, an attorney, said the same thing — but he suspected that scammers could have found his home address in England because he used to own property in Florida.

Back when the property in Randolph was getting ready to be sold, Shaw says no one involved detected that this was a scam.

“No one suspected it, not the attorneys, not myself, not the title company,” she said.

When the supposed property owner asked Shaw about the offers that had come in, Shaw said she told him that the highest one was for $140,000, and that he told her to immediately accept the offer.

Sale documents were soon prepared and the man provided paperwork that purportedly showed he had gotten the deed notarized at the U.S. embassy in Vietnam.

In December, the deal closed — all while the real property owners had no clue that the transaction had taken place. The supposed seller asked for the $140,000 payment to be split in half and sent to two different banks, according to Shaw.

But the title company encountered trouble while attempting to submit the second $70,000 payment.

“That set off the red flag,” explained Shaw, who said that the title company was then able to get in touch with the son of the real owners. “We knew it was definitely identity fraud.”

But by that point, it was too late. Shaw said that the initial $70,000 payment had already gone through, and the supposed seller had disappeared.

The buyer that paid $70,000 to the fraudulent seller is still listed in municipal and county tax records as the property’s new owner — but since the original owners did not authorize the sale, it remains unclear what will happen to the land now.

“It was a real shock to find out that people were devious [enough] to do this kind of thing,” Shaw said.

‘A lot of litigation’

ABC News has learned that the FBI is now investigating the alleged scammers who fraudulently sold the lot in Randolph — though the owners of the British and Canadian homes that were used as fake addresses said they have not yet been contacted by American law enforcement authorities. The FBI would not confirm or deny details of the investigation.

Dennehy, who was previously FBI Newark’s Special Agent in Charge, is urging owners of vacant land to remain vigilant and check their property records, as the bureau has reported a 500% increase in vacant land fraud over the last four years.

“It all comes down to due diligence on behalf of the buyer, the real estate agent, the title companies and beyond,” Dennehy said, explaining that scam artists pretend to be real landowners by using publicly accessible property information.

Dennehy cited another New Jersey case in which a property owner found out that her land was fraudulently sold when the new owner showed up with construction equipment.

The FBI is encouraging real estate agents and property owners who suspect fraud to contact authorities before money changes hands.

“It’s probably going to be a whole lot of litigation for many, many months and years to come, if that money is already gone,” Dennehy said. “Technically you’re no longer the owner of the property, so now it has to get into civil lawsuits, a lot of lawyers [with] a lot of litigation involved in order to try to reclaim what’s yours to begin with.”

‘Vacant land is very easy to steal’

As a result of these scams, real estate industry groups in parts of the country with large swaths of vacant land are issuing urgent warnings to their members.

“Vacant land is very easy to steal because not everybody is going to be checking up on a vacant piece of property once a month,” Emily Bowden, executive officer of the Sussex County Association of REALTORS in New Jersey, told ABC News. “Not everyone who owns that land necessarily lives in our area.”

Bowden said real estate agents should try to meet with sellers in person whenever possible, make sure that their mailing addresses line up, and assess how well sellers actually know the lay of the land that they are seeking to put on the market.

A desire to sell a vacant lot as quickly as possible can be suspicious, Bowden said, adding that real estate agents who do not do their due diligence when representing fraudulent sellers could face lawsuits.

Derek Doernbach, who sells properties on the Jersey Shore, says he was contacted by three purported sellers who he believes were actually scammers. He said that, as a result of his suspicions, he declined to list any of the three properties.

According to Doernbach, all of the supposed sellers sent him Canadian driver’s licenses containing the exact same picture and address as the license that was presented to Shaw by the alleged scammer in the Randolph case.

“Without a doubt, this has to be the same people, or it’s just a ring on the dark web that is circulating the same driver’s license around,” Doernbach said.

A year after she was first contacted by the alleged Randolph scammer, Shaw says she wants to make sure other real estate agents remain on the lookout.

“If you have a piece of property that someone wants to sell and it’s vacant property, really, really get your feelers up on that one because there could be a potential fraud,” she said. “It’s a very easy way that they’re doing this, and it’s successful. And nobody knows until after the fact.”