I had a quick tip that I saw at the Utah Division of Real Estate Caravan, a tip on land sale fraud, which is becoming more prevalent. If you don’t know what’s happening, these fraudsters are looking up land that’s either vacant or the owners live out of state or out of country, and then they pretend to be that person, they hire a real estate agent, they sell the property, and they collect the money on the sale then run off with it because they’re not the real owner.

They pull this off because they are very sophisticated in how they can show fake driver’s licenses, fake IDs, they’ll even sometimes do a video chat, only that’s rarer. A lot of times they’ll say, “I’m out of traveling and I can only contact by email,” or “I’m not in town, so I need to do this really quick.” There are a lot of reasons they give to try to make it urgent, and they try to give you ID that they can falsify by sending it remotely.

One Great Tip

And so, one of the really good tips I heard in this meeting was for if you get an offer as a Utah real estate agent to list a property that is vacant or land by itself with no mortgage so that there’s no bank that’s going to check on it. If you get an offer to list a property like that, and you are aware now that there’s a lot of land scams going on of fake listings going up, and you don’t want to be a party to any of this kind of fraud, then the one check that they suggested that you do is this. After you get the inquiry to do the listing, send a certified letter to the address on the county records of the owner so that you can get a response verification that says, “Yes, this is my property, I own it, and I want to sell it.”

And that’s the one of the best ways you can contact and make sure you’re talking to the real owner, because a certified letter to that original address will have to be signed by somebody who lives there. It’s the true address of the owner on file, and that way they can verify. All the letter has to say is something like, “Yes, I did contact you to list my property and agree to the terms that we talked about previously.”

So that’s a really good tip. I think it’s a great way that we can hopefully crack down on some of these fraudsters and reduce the amount of land fraud selling scams that have been going around lately. We can identify proper sellers, that way we can improve our professionalism, and we can show our clients that we really know how to do the business.