Real Estate Fraud The Next Identity Theft?

It looks like real estate fraud cases are occuring much more often then you would expect. The crimes are so difficult to investigate and consume too much manpower that police jurisdictions are overwhelmed to the point that they will not investigate some of them.

This is scary as it is a major crime that can impact many as foreclosures and false representation can harm much more than an individual household but whole neighborhoods. When a home is assessed for too much money, a mortgage written, and the house is then left vacant and destitute until the bank can complete forclosure the house turns into a blight on the neighborhood.

When subdivisions are targeted, the homes that honest people buy are severely devalued forcing them into bankruptcy and destroying their future. The police need to respect this and work hard to make sure that real estate crimes are prosecuted to their fullest. Read this example coming out San Bernardino.

San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Real Estate Unit, is the lack of adequate staff to handle a growing number of real estate fraud cases in the county.

“The easy (cases) take four or five months, while the hard ones take years,” said Larry Roberts, the unit’s lead deputy district attorney. “There are just not enough people and hours in the day to get to all the cases.”

Roberts said the unit currently consists of one supervising investigator, three active investigators and two prosecutors. Their caseload is small compared to their counterparts in the district attorney’s other units, but the investigating process is more time consuming and usually involves following a paper trail.

For 2005-06, the unit has received 128 complaints of some form of real estate fraud. Of those, only 34 have been accepted for investigation. The previous year, the unit investigated a total of 90 cases.

There are currently 39 real estate fraud cases making their way through the court system across the county.

“I’d say 30 to 50 percent of our cases come from the High Desert,” Roberts said. “There is a lot of vacant land there, which tends to be the subject of real estate fraud.”

Many of the cases not investigated are turned away simply because the department doesn’t have the time to work on them, Roberts said. via the Daily Press..

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