A new study released by ABC Finance has determined that only 3% of total property fraud cases in the UK are proactively prevented by fraud controls.

Property fraud occurs when fraudsters take out fraudulent mortgages on a consumer’s property through identity theft. Since all property titles in the UK are published online, it is not difficult for fraudsters to scan the internet to see the details of who owns a particular property.

In other scams, fraudsters attempt to sell the property from under a landowners nose or transfer the properties into their own names by forging documents in the borrower’s name.

And in some cases, fraudsters will rent out properties that do not belong to them and then collect the rent checks. They will often target homeowners that do not occupy the property or live in another city.

Each year, over 1,000 cases of property fraud are filed, and victims lose 8.5 Million GBP.

But of those 1,000 cases, banks only detect about 31 of those cases proactively, meaning that consumers are reporting 969 cases on their own.

In the last 14 years, close to 14,000 property fraud claims have been made. With the total pay-out amounting to 120m GBP.

More proactive identification and more consumer education is necessary to halt this disturbing trend.

Thank you to Ian Mitchell for his tip on this shocking statistic on property fraud in the UK

Thanks for reading!